Not Fade Away
These programs like to waste my time—or at least that’s what it feels like.
I’ve been using the new Adobe CS3 applications full-time for a little over a week now, at home and the office. The change to fast, stable Universal Binaries is a welcome one, as are several of the more subtle tool refinements. But there’s one new addition that punches me in the eye every time I see it.
That damn fade.
Cue Transition
For those of you already using a CS3 app, you know what I’m talking about. When you make one of the new applications active the entire program UI fades into view over the course of a quarter of a second or so.
Someone thought this was slick. Someone thought this was pretty. Someone was fairly misguided.
Pause for Effect(s): Photoshop makes its dramatic entrance.
Ill-considered UI fluff like this makes me want to run for my copy of The Humane Interface and wave it about wildly. It’s not a question of aesthetics. It’s a question of perceived performance.
All this fade does is increase the time I have to wait for the application to become active, and therefore usable. Sure it only takes a quarter of a second, but users in heavy production environments (arguably Adobe’s core) switch back and forth between these apps hundreds, maybe thousands, of times a day. What starts out as an annoying stutter compounds to steal minutes out of every day. It doesn’t matter if the applications are screaming speed demons chockablock with fastidiously optimized code—they built a speed bump right outside the front door.
The subconscious is being trained to fold its arms and tap its foot every time you click, tab or otherwise stumble your way into Adobeland. Somewhere a neuron is saying, “Damn it, I was in the middle of a flow there.”
David Sleight is a web designer living and working in New York City, and the Deputy Creative Director of BusinessWeek.com
Recent Posts
- InterludeTransients, of a kind.
- Soul TrainEverywhere you want to be.
- A Style of LookingEverything new is not.
- BusinessLinkedLess one degree of separation.
- Wounded LandsNear hits, near misses.
- Some Shall PassContent car-tellin' it.
Comments
Angelo May 15th, 2007 at 11:53 am
Sounds like the kind of thing Adobe should allow users to enable via preferences.
David Sleight May 15th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Indeed. In fact, the very first time I saw it in the Photoshop CS3 beta I went digging for a preference to turn it off. Alas, the search was for naught.
bruno May 15th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
Ya know I’ve heard this argument before when X software company adds X fluff it simply wastes time. What I had not heard before was the bit at the end regarding the “flow”. Wow that is where I think this kind of fluff really gets in the way of a designer. Never thought about it quite that way - thanks for the insight. Regardless of how long X fluff takes it interrupts the flow of things and that is huge;^>
Pete May 15th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
Did they include a way to turn off the freaking VersionCue icon?
That’s the sort of thing that slowly drives Pete crazy…
David Sleight May 15th, 2007 at 11:28 pm
Bruno: That’s also why I mentioned Raskin’s book. Whether or not one agrees with everything he says, he takes a solid quantitative approach, outlining best practices for definitively measuring UI performance. (Techniques like the GOMS Keystroke-Level Model, etc.) It gives people a way to discuss UIs that takes the conversation beyond the realm of opinion.
Pete: Yup, there’s a preference. Even better, it didn’t stick itself in the menu bar by default this time around.
And yeah, I think I know exactly how you feel.
Eric June 27th, 2007 at 10:13 am
Oh dear god make it stop, the fade effect is so very annoying. Why did Adobe do this???
Jeff February 5th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
I run a G4, dual 450 with 1.25gb ram. I haven’t had a slow performance issue as you have described. I also run a single 1.25ghz with 768mb ram and haven’t had too much trouble.
I understand that you’re frustrated with the current state of things, however, the book you mentioned seems to be dreaming up an impossible set up. Could you imagine if Adobe started creating their apps to be accessible to every other app on your computer with a universal access menu? First, Adobe wouldn’t do it because they would lose their Identity amongst the hundreds, if not thousands of poorly designed or underdeveloped apps out there.
Second, having a setup like this would render most developers useless or ineffectual.
Just my two cents.
Duran May 2nd, 2008 at 12:05 pm
I’m done trying to look for a fix.. I guess I’ll just have to live with it. Sigh…
E-mail address will not be displayed. You can use <a href>, <blockquote>, <code>, <em> and <strong> tags in your comment. Line breaks are automatically converted.