Adobe guru to improve Windows interface

It looks like Mark Hamburg, an Adobe Systems Photoshop and Lightroom programming guru, will be leading work to give Microsoft Windows a better user interface.

And given the dramatic user interface differences between earlier and later Adobe projects that Hamburg worked on, that raises some very intriguing possibilities.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is used to edit and catalog photos, chiefly the raw images that come from higher-end digital cameras. Compare its design, deliberately imbued with 'personality' and 'elegance,' to that of Photoshop below.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

Microsoft and Adobe Systems confirmed Hamburg's move on Monday, but at the time, Microsoft wouldn't share details beyond saying Hamburg would work on "user experience" for the company. However, Chicago photographer and Photoshop consultant Jeff Schewe, who caught a plane to California to attend Hamburg's going-away party, shared a lot more on his blog.

"He was heavily recruited by Microsoft and given an unbeatable opportunity to work outside his normal digital imaging field," Schewe said. "Mark was invited by (Microsoft Chief Technology Officer) David Vaskevitch to come lead a team working on the future of operating system user experience at Microsoft."

Adobe Photoshop's interface has well over a decade's worth of accumulated menus, panels, and dialog boxes.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET Networks)

Schewe also quoted Hamburg about the change: "Given that I find the current Windows experience really annoying and yet I keep having to deal with it, this opportunity was a little too interesting to turn down. I can't imagine doing serious imaging anywhere other than Adobe, but I needed to do something other than imaging for a while."

Hamburg's baby: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
So what does Hamburg's move portend? It's way too soon to say Microsoft will be better able to counter the widespread opinion that Apple's Mac OS X is superior, but Hamburg's Adobe work sheds some light on the new possibilities.

Hamburg joined Adobe to work on version 2.0 of Photoshop in 1990. After Photoshop 7 was released, he turned his attention to lead Shadowland, the project that became Photoshop Lightroom. That software, which is used to edit and catalog photos, is a major break from Photoshop when it comes to user interface.

Where Photoshop has a seemingly endless list of menus, submenus, dialog boxes, and configurable panels, Lightroom adapts to the task at hand.

Central is the photo in the middle, as large as possible. Adjustment panes can be pulled out from all four sides based on various tasks. The software shifts appearance according to modes for managing catalogs, developing an individual photo, showing slideshows, printing, and creating photo galleries for the Web.

Overhauling user interfaces can be tough, though. Short-term pain caused by unfamiliarity can challenge the long-term benefits of a clean-slate design.

Adobe is proceeding cautiously with a Photoshop interface overhaul. And Microsoft has had trouble with its "ribbon," which presents a task-based interface across the top of Microsoft Office 2007 programs. It's been tough for many users to adjust to the ribbon, and Microsoft is trying ways to make it easier to find the commands they want to perform.

Hamburg's goals: "elegance," "personality"
Some possibilities can be gleaned from Hamburg himself. He discussed some of his Lightroom design goals in a 2007 blog posting.

"We wanted Lightroom to seem elegant, to exhibit grace, to show an attention to style beyond the utilitarian aspect that dominated Adobe's products up to that time. We wanted a richer UI experience," Hamburg said.

And Adobe wanted to give Lightroom a deliberate personality--even if that means some feathers are ruffled.

"One of the goals in Lightroom was to consciously think about the product personality we were trying to create with the expectation that a less accidental personality would induce a stronger emotional reaction in users. That stronger reaction can be both positive and negative," he said. "The second part of this goal was to have enough passionate users to outweigh the detractors."

Finally, he said Adobe wanted to balance power and complexity, adding the latter only when it significantly increased the former.

Designing a user interface for a product with as limited a range of abilities as Lightroom is a very different task than a user interface for an entire operating system, though. But even if Windows doesn't directly copy Lightroom, for example, by changing its look to suit the task at hand, I for one would welcome a version of Windows with elegance, personality, and power.

[y82whs]

Good grief

1. Much as I like the functionality of Adobe products, I sure wouldn't tout their UI, including Lightshop. They are powerful but complex tools. I have never heard "Adobe" and "intuitive interface" in a sentence....<br /><br />2. Vaskevitch as far as I know has never designed a UI (he was hired into MSFT in their sales/marketing group). He later worked in databases. <br /><br />Good luck, future OSs!

[Penguinisto]

Agreed... holy damn!

They should've hired Kai Krause to redo Windows' UI for all the good it'll do 'em. Blecch.<br /><br />I mean, Adobe's early stuff wasn't exactly eye-candy heaven, but at least it didn't have the massive amount of bloat that Adobe's later products have. Vista and Microsoft have a big enough problem as it is with bloat and 'style over substance'....

[The_happy_switcher]

Anybody outside Microsoft

will be an improvement.

[jackwhite21]

great but

you can paint your car all day but if its a geo metro whats the point

[Heebee Jeebies]

Great...

Just take a look at the poor Lightroom interface it is a decade behind what it should be. You can't rearrange panels, close out the panels you don't want or ever use. Second or third monitor support even in beta 2 is a joke. Yah, we need this guy making windows "better".<br /><br />At this rate I am going to be willing to shell out the big bucks for a Mac just to get away from Microsoft's one big joke after another Windows updates.<br /><br />Robert

[punterjoe]

Evolution? ok. Mere new chrome? No.

Not to come off as reactionary, but we all know of UI "upgrades" that destroyed productivity. Sexy, sleek &#38; cool is fine for fashion, but unless it's elegance is in service to function it is at best useless and quite likely counterproductive. That's one of the things I like about Gnu/Linux/FreeBSD - I can make the UI as fugly ...and useful.... as I choose.<br />MS wisely did that with the XP "classic" UI. I hope they remember that lesson.

[siriusproductions]

"Personality"?

What the UI needs to be is unobtrusive and as close to invisible as possible. It should be more than merely intuitive, although that would be a good start. It should be as unobtrusive as using everyday objects, such as a light switch, a doorknob, a steering wheel and gas pedal, and a teapot.<br /><br />How much attention do we pay to the light switch when turning the lights on or off? Can you describe your bathroom's doorknob? I bet you pay no attention to it as you use it. The same with your car's steering wheel and gas pedal. Without looking, describe the pedal: is it hinged from the top or bottom, or not hinged at all? What about the teapot? You just *use* it, right? The design of all of those things is unobtrusive and close to invisible, whether it was superbly, ergonomically designed or cobbled together by an engineer instead of a designer.<br /><br />Instead of giving Windows "elegance" (and someone explain, really explain -- in English -- exactly how a user interface would be "elegant" to use rather than "elegant" to look at) or (heaven help us!) a "personality", I hope the former Adobe guru has the good sense to make it as unobtrusive and natural to use as possible.<br /><br />If that has to be labelled "intuitive", OK, I'll begrudge him that, but the most important part of "user interface" is the first syllable. It's supposed to be *used*.<br /><br />Let the hackers and geeks endlessly debate whether a button is one pixel too big and whether a its corner's radius is too small, but the vast majority of computers users actually *use* their computer. We don't want a "user experience" and we don't want it to have a personality. We *use* the computer to do things with, such as write a report, work on a spreadsheet, process an image, etc. Once a mechanic has a good wrench, he doesn't agonize endlessly over its "personality". He just uses the damned thing.<br /><br />In a movie, if the acting, or cinematography, or editing are superb, no one notices them, but if any of those are poorly done, it's extremely obvious. Instead of noticing every cut and fade, they should combine so unobtrusively that we don't notice any of them and only see the finished excellent movie. The Windows UI should be that kind of invisible. So far, it's like Uncle Bob's stack of Super-8 movies from his last vacation: kind-of/sort-of spliced together, but with some of the over-exposed and out-of-focus bits left in and the image on the screen jumps every time a bad splice goes through the projector.<br /><br />The problem with letting computer nerds design computers and user interfaces is that they're computer nerds. They design it for other computer nerds. If ever an outsider needed to be brought into the process, it's when the UI is designed.<br /><br />However, I'm quite sure that the next version of Windows will have some new kind of razzle-dazzle distractions that will be described as "features" and whose major purpose is to scream "look at me" and "my designer is a god".<br /><br />Jeff

[Shankland]

Intuitive as a doorknob?

First, I agree that unobtrusive and ergonomic is nice, and I'm not going to try to make the case that "personality" is necessarily what Windows needs. However:<br /><br />I'd argue that a doorknob or light switch has a vastly narrower job to perform than an operating system, so it's easier to make it fade into the background. And I disagree with your car analogy. Perhaps the pedal works ergonomically, but you still have to learn to use the pedal, just like you had to learn to click on Windows' start menu. It's gotten a lot easier to use cars over the years (no more choke, automatic transmissions), but it still takes a lot of training. There's some correspondence between complex things and complex interfaces.<br /><br />If you put a doorknob in front of somebody transported to the present from 100,000 years ago, that person might figure it out by wiggling it and toying with it. *You* don't think about it, but that's because you learned how to use it. I have a small child, and watching him learn to use light switches was alternately fascinating and frustrating. I welcome the day an operating system will disappear into ultraconvenient invisibility, but I don't expect that day to arrive any time soon.<br /><br />As a final note, people *use* cars to drive from point A to point B, but they still often want them to have personalities. (I'm not on that list.) There's an interesting tension between models like Toyota Camry designed to appeal the largest possible audience and models like Dodge Ram that are designed for a smaller niche of people who find the relatively distinctive design appealing.

[ewelch]

Canards and Memes do not a reasoned statement make

You can argue all you want that uglifying an interface makes it <br />more useful or productive, but you miss the point. And that is <br />exactly what the rest of the computer industry misses when they <br />think OS X is eye candy. <br /><br />As Steve Jobs has reiterated over and over, design is not only <br />about how something looks, but how it works. That is the key to <br />why OS X allows people to be more productive as they get to <br />know and use it. It's not just eye candy. It has scripting and <br />automation that has no equivalent in Windows. It works. <br /><br />What Microsoft needs to do is not copy someone else, but come <br />up with a way to fix their software so that it actually increases <br />productivity of its user.<br /><br />What else are we to conclude when Microsoft themselves admit <br />now that all those annoying security questions that Apple poked <br />fun at in their "Get a Mac" ad Security where the security guy <br />kept asking "cancel or allow," were put in to annoy people by <br />thwarting them from doing without constant interruptions. That <br />kind of nonsense would never be allowed in any other OS! <br /><br />The bottom line is that the user interface is critical in making <br />the computer either get in the way, or out of the way to the user <br />doing things.<br /><br />And if you claim you don't understand what is meant by the <br />term elegant, then you are either being disingenuous, or obtuse.

[technewsjunkie]

Lots of luck! (it's more than the interface)

A monumental task.

[derpat]

Lightroom interface

It seems to me that the "elegance" of the Lightroom interface <br />(introduce in 2006) is curiously very correlated with the elegance of <br />Aperture interface (2005).<br />Microsoft should hire someone from 1 inifinite loop ...

[R. U. Sirius]

Yes it is

You are correct. Aperture was first.<br /><br />That said, when most of us who use Adobe products think of UI, it is more along the lines of what you see with the editing apps: Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, etc. The UI's are klunky and unintutive for the most part.<br /><br />If this is the direction MS is going, my take is that it is a step backwards. Adobe has nice programs, but the UI is not the best, or even close to being the best. There is a chance that this guy could make things worse.

[Starfires]

Givign Windows Personality

Windows is just too generic-looking compared to the types of software you can run on it. Lightroom is a good example of an interface that inspires and takes you places rather than seeinging functional. Of course, Windows has improved and Vista (visually) is the best yet.<br /><br />Of course, I should add that this was written on a Macbook, which gives me this all in spades. The only thing I miss is a right click...

[dbadd]

Improve ??????

If you call using fonts that are to dim to read and improvement then there is something wrong with your way of thinking. Maybe now that Adobe is rid of him they will change literoom and elements6 to something more readable and useable

[R. U. Sirius]

Oh No

I have a bunch of Adobe products, but the strength of their stuff is not in the UI. I'm not sure what MS is thinking, but Adobe seems to have some of the worst UI's out there, even worse than Office. <br /><br />As for Lightroom, meh, it's a derivation on Aperture, which is a derivation on file browsers, which of course have been around a long while.

[verdyp]

Given the extremely poor user interface of Windows Vista that is extremely confusive and nearly impossible to navigate, and much worse than in Windows XP, Microsoft seems to have lost what USABILITY means.<br />Really Microsoft needs better trained designers, because most of the technical improvements in Vista for the graphical rendering are completely lost by a nightmare of badly designed dialog boxes and multiple windows, options that are impossible to remember where they are accessible, essential items lost in deep navigation throough multiple dialogs, confusive security settings forgetting the most essential things, an unusable GUI for network configuration (the "network center" gives not enough details, and it's impossible to have a clear synthetic view of what may be wrong).<br />A user interface, before being "cute" must first focus on the user actions and be able to display the information. The user interface in Vista is completely unfinished, using non unified GUI items and multiple confusive designs (both old and new).<br />For Office, the situation is certainly better, but if you look at the configuration panels for the optional components (notably in Outlook) nothing is correctly integrated.<br />and more generally, the administrator tools are really poor, missing lots of details or with many bugs, or with confusive non-unified terminology.<br />There are also too many settings for various Windows APIs managing the same thing but managed separately with very different tools.<br />The domain policy settings can't be managed easily.<br />The system backup options and tools are almost invisible, really a bad thing for a OS.<br />Managing the applications and services that run at system startup or at user logon is impossible without using third-party tools (too many things are hidden)<br />Many configuration items are undocumented.<br />The new presentation of the filesystem is confusive: it shows aliased directory names that can't even be accessed from the Explorer (they are visible and accessible from other programs). The Explorer can't update itself its cached data when desktop.ini files are updated.<br />There's no central cleanup for cleaning up many caches (the APIs to do that exist but is not offered in any gui item)<br />Managing the advanced security is impossible<br />There's no way to manage the named streams on NTFS (you need third party tools)<br />There's no way to check the coherence of security settings on files, directories and registry.<br />There's no way to manage program and services dependencies<br />There's no easy way to restore the functionality of a non working service that has been corrupted by some program installer/uninstaller or after cleaning up a malware infection.<br /><br />Regarding the user interface preference, the various theme and skins options are dispersed, or even don't work together.<br />The multilingual capabilities of Windows are really poor.<br />customizing the desktop organization or Explorer menus is almost impossible, Microsoft decides what is best for a new version but does not tolerate keeping the previous organization.<br />Internet Explorer can't tolerate that users manage the toolbars.<br />Toolbars in various windows or Office programs don't work the same way...<br /><br />Pfiuuuu... Vista is a complete failure (in addition to be really too much non unified code doing the same thing but in different ways depending on the tool that is used).<br />Troubleshooters are not unified.<br /><br />So what is good in Vista?<br />* The new DirectX 10 may be, but it still does not work with most PCs or notebooks as it requires too much hardware capabilities.<br />* New system services? most of them were added and installed without describing them to users, users don't even know if they can be stopped; Vista is not enough modular, most of it should be installed only on demand when needed (this requires better management of dependencies)<br />* A better process/thread schedulers? Yes but too many background services running doing unknown things and using much resources (in memory or disk or over a LAN)<br />* cute icons? Yes but only in large sizes, most of daily actions need to display more things.<br />* Aero? Cute but not essential, window border transparency is not really needed that's really a detail.<br /><br />In fact You can't do anything with Vista alone for daily use to manage your applications, you'll need many third-party tools, hoping that they are safe (and many of them are crapwares or even malwares). The first need will be to install a complete suite to manage your PC, but the unfinished UAC is still causing lots of problems for these tools.<br /><br />Microsoft is best known for breaking things that do work and that people really like. Microsoft likes disturbing users by always changing its own mind about the best way to do something; there's no clear strategy, no clear and gradual evolution. Microsoft until now has always changed the GUI radically without good rationales for doing this (this was not even necessary for security and broke applications).