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This feels particularly egregious because of our unspoken assumption that Adobe, of all companies, should have "excellence in design" somewhere on its list of core guiding principles (I know, I know, hear me out). It feels like there should be someone internally at some point who says "hold on, this really goes against who we are as a company, what happened here". It's instructive to look at how a company presents itself to the public, so I went looking at what Adobe says about itself, and what is the first instance I can find of a principle or value that this bad UX violates. Google result: > Adobe: Creative, marketing and document management solutions
> Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. We help our customers create, deliver and optimize content and applications. About page: >Changing the world through personalized digital experiences.
>Adobe empowers everyone, everywhere to imagine, create, and bring any digital experience to life. From creators and students to small businesses, global enterprises, and nonprofit organizations — customers choose Adobe products to ideate, collaborate, be more productive, drive business growth, and build remarkable experiences. >Creative Cloud
>Industry-leading photography, design, illustration, and video apps that professionals rely on to do their best work. Company values:
https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/03/07/evolving-adobes... >Creativity is not only what we enable for the world but it’s also core to the fabric of the company. It has driven our curiosity to look around the corner to transform the industry and ourselves. Over 40 years, we launched the desktop publishing revolution with PostScript, innovated and led every category that we are in — creativity, documents, customer experience management — to serve a wider customer universe. Create the future is all about being the customer and being relentless across all the elements that make up customer centricity to delight them, deliver unparalleled value and innovate to address unmet (and possibly unknown) needs. >Raise the bar is about continuous evolution and never being satisfied with the status quo. It’s about never settling for good enough and always striving to be first, only and best. It’s about being intellectually honest and direct in talking about the things that aren’t going well and always looking to do better. At the end of the day, our ultimate measure of success is the customer and today more than ever, we need to surprise and delight them at every turn. So really, the closest I could find to guiding principles being broken are tangential concepts like "remarkable experiences", "customer centricity", and "surprise and delight". Good goals for any company, but not especially design focused in my opinion. Paraphrasing, Adobe as a company thinks of itself as a provider of technology to fuel content, marketing, and advertising money-making machines. Design at this point is incidental to who their customer happens to be. I am sure individual employees might feel different, but as a company, we have no more reason to expect excellent UX from Adobe than, for example, Oracle or Salesforce. |