Retraining yourself on the keyboard

With PS CS, I’ve noticed a lot of little things that are just now annoying, and can’t figure out the motivation. In SIGCHI, we used to call this "violating historical models" in UI design.

Here are some examples:

Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y no longer step through the history list… Now, it seems that I have to use the "step forward" and "step backward" menu items, which are bound to different keystrokes. What’s the difference, other than now I have to hold down a lot more modifier keys to do what I used to do?

In this case, we have a good "out" in that I can now rebind keystrokes to menu items. This is definitely good, so it turns out that I can just bind Ctrl+Z to "step backwards" and Ctrl+Y to "step forward", and get back to where I was. Oh, but then I have to deal with rebinding undo/redo to something… ugh. People shouldn’t have to go to such lengths just to put them back to the way they used to be. Because people get used to "default settings" and other behaviors of their apps, they instincively train themselves accordingly. Relearning behavior is frustrating.

(Hence, part of the importance of backwards compatibility of old configuration settings from another thread.)

The next problem that doesn’t have the same solution, however, is an area of "default focus." In these cases, when you use a keyboard shortcut to bring up a dialog, the item that has the initial keyboard focus has changed. For example, if you bring up the Hue/Saturation dialog, the highlighted item was the numerical value of Hue. So, people who do a certain kind of thing often got used to that. In my case, I’d immediately hit TAB and go to the numerical value of Saturation, and type in what I think would be the right value (based on historical intuition). But with PS CS, the initial focus is on the "OK" button, so hitting TAB just goes to "Cancel"… getting it to go where I wanted it to be requires hitting TAB a whole lot, and well, this is where frustration comes back again.

There are many dialogs that suffer from this sort of thing, so it’s important for UI designers to be cognizant of such models. All dialogs have "default focus", but other behaviors are also involved. For example, if you bring up a save or open dialog and click on a filename, you USED to be able to then click on the Textfield that now has the filename inserted, and just start typing at wherever the insertion cursor was placed (based on where you typed). This was true for PS all the way up to PS 7.0, at which point it changed (yes, just PS changed, not the OS, or other UI elements in Windows). Now, it highlights the entire word, at which point you have to click again at the point where you want the insertion cursor.

There’s no question that these little items (of which there are many, but I’ve only listed a few) are not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. But, they add up to a whole lot when viewed as a whole. It seems that every time I pick up a new version of PS, I almost have to learn a whole new app. I’d love to just pick up from where I was before and learn the "new features" at my own pace.