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usability testing for Photoshop Mix

Adobe Photoshop has a long established history as a desktop application. Users that rely on Photoshop for their professional work or creative passions have many experience and interactive expectations, even muscle memories, that develop over the course of usage. When Adobe started moving their compositing technologies to the iPad in Photoshop Mix, we wanted to see if designs for selection and compositing tools in this new mobile context were both intuitive and useable for users newer to Photoshop while also meeting expectations for established Photoshop users. Additionally, some of the processing required to achieve the end result would need to be done on the cloud, so we also wanted to examine the tablet to cloud experience.

How: An in-person usability study using a series of goal-oriented tasks. Participants were provided with input images and asked to create a particular visual output.

“Aha” Insights: There was a perception that when the cloud was involved for processing there was additional overhead, and that, along with unpredictable results, actually deterred experimentation. We also found many opportunities to revise the UI to not only better align with users’ expectations based on their experiences with Photoshop, but also mobile devices.

What it Meant: While the cloud made it possible to port some powerful technologies to the iPad, the location of the processing (and the user content) wasn’t important to participants. What mattered most was using interface conventions that provided them with an experience they expected and which, therefore, encouraged experimentation with images and compositing. They only needed to know about the cloud when there was an issue like no connectivity or data usage.

Outcome: The interface and experience was revised based on feedback from the study.