From Chris Pratley's blog, the husband of a coworker:WordStar made a few releases, each time preserving their set of keystrokes and operation, as well as being able to work with old files. Then they made a huge mistake. They created an app called WordStar 2000 (WS2000). This was completely different in its interface, and in its file format (backwards and forwards). It was essentially an entirely new and different application, designed from the ground up. I would love to hear from someone who worked on that version of WordStar about what the thinking was behind that release. Maybe they thought they had the market so sewn up that they could make what they probably felt was a radically better product by doing a rewrite and not lose customers. But what happened instead was that they leveled the playing field.Since the new product was no more similar to the old one that any of its competitors, what customers did (other than yell and scream) was evaluate all the options. And WordPerfect (for DOS) won out.
I read this and started thinking about Quark, which continues to have a stranglehold on the print design industry. My take on this, as someone who's done a bit of print design work in school, but never professionally? It's been years since a real update to their product, and since then a number of competitors have risen to take their place such as InDesign, which leverages the existing UI conventions of the rest of the Adobe suite, as well as being easily portable across different applications. Jon Armstrong (aka Mr. Dooce) has more thorough ranting on this.
My question: Would Quark be best served by adopting Adobe's UI? Or would it alienate all of their current users, who would reassess and realize that yeah, InDesign's better?
Whether they would is a separate question, most likely answered with the "we don't want it if it wasn't invented here" principle of engineering, and the "fuck the user" principle of Quark.
April 27, 2004 04:47 PMBeing one of the people who have never managed to migrate to inDesign -- besides the fact that inDesign became popular around the time I graduated from school and stopped doing print projects; God I graduated in a lousy time :p -- I was wondering how "ashamed" I should be.
Quark was pretty sweet around V 3.3 - 4.01, based on my experience. I liked the sense of distinction Quark's UX gave it to me.
Synchronously >> Using Quark meant "I am a specialist, I have a job skill that's hard for others to dispute. Diachronically >> Getting my images ready in Adobe apps and then launching Quark mentally put me into the next state of the workflow (or artistry if you will), where you put everything together, carefully craft and complete your project.
(is using "synchronously" and "diachronically" appropriate here? i started with "horizontally" and "vertically" but it didn't seem quite right. how about "microdiachronically?" :)
Yes, using Quark is probably not the most efficient course of action, but it's also about exercising my expertise. In fact, having looked at the Microsoft Office UI for almost a year and a half, I appreciate the sense of precision and control even more.
But then, do I need Quark to feel that now, in year 2004?
My current answer is No. Sadly for Quark, Adobe as a brand has evolved well and now sufficiently represents the precision and the expertise most design industry members need to feel. Quark may still give sharper sense of traditional artistry to the user, but it is not worth the extraneous headache it requires -- I feel exhilerated enough when I switch from PowerPoint drawing tool (called OfficeArt) to Illustrator. I don't need Quark to feel that even more. Adobe already gave it to me.
Oh well, long and unnecessary justification of why I just looked at the Univ. of Washington website for Adobe Creativity Suite price!
(sidenote: I don't know how inDesign and Quark fare in terms of internationalization and multilingual document creation. Something a person like me should always consider... nuts)
Another question to think about is: How good is it to have your UX unified -- in the Adobe way? Now that I spend most of my design time on Adobe apps, and because I believe they are well designed... when I am asked to redesign or brainstrom on an existing Office UI, my first sketch often is the "Adobe" version of it. And I see this pattern in other designers too.
Adobe UI works well, and unified and consistent experience brings efficiency. But I often see "goodness" in Visio UI or PowerPoint UI that are meant for different purpoes (just not nearly well thought out or executted), and being immersed in Adobe UX can take that sensitivity away.
God, my blog will have to be in Wiki, so that anyone can correct my English.
Posted by: same gal at May 15, 2004 11:56 PMIt sounds like the same ideas of eliteness and "being hardcore" that come in many engineering and technical fields. Often yes, a new product is in many ways inferior to an older one. But by merely being more convenient, it wins over most of the market. In time it may catch up to the orignial in terms of power, but for the most part will take care of what most users need.
In terms of having a unified UX -- well, having existing conventions you can leverage (and to some degree shouldn't reinvent) is mostly a good thing, yes? The paradigms need to be broken occasionally, but until then evolutionary improvement ain't bad. This is not the same as taking something someone else does well (in your case Adobe), and trying to brand it in your own way (Office) but without actually improving it.
Also I need to learn more about Wiki, which of course has an interesting and pertinent entry on this topic.
Posted by: brian at May 28, 2004 10:57 PM