AdminPatrick Palmer
(Director of Product Management, Pro Video and Motion Design, Adobe DVA)
My feedback
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278 votesUnder Review ·AdminPatrick Palmer
(Director of Product Management, Pro Video and Motion Design, Adobe DVA)
responded
All,
first of all I wanted to thank everyone for making this a productive conversation over the last couple of days.
As several people responded to my comment about keeping the tone civilised, I need to dwell on that for a minute. Please hear me out, this is important to everyone on my crew and I hope it will be to you.
Saying that we shouldn't be surprised when things get heated is very problematic in my opinion. How do you expect a junior person on my team to respond to a technical question when it is combined with something that can easily be described as hate speech? How do you think we can actually come together on actual issues when there's already the assumption that we're a big faceless corporation, not even listening to our customers?
People on my team have received threats. I've been there over the years,…
An error occurred while saving the comment An error occurred while saving the comment AdminPatrick Palmer
(Director of Product Management, Pro Video and Motion Design, Adobe DVA)
commented
Quick Update on the change in behaviour for file export / picking a name from within the destination folder from a file that already exists: I didn't have the latest on that one. It's already been revised to behave like it did previously (effectively like it's OS standard for all applications when using "Save as"). This should go into public beta in a couple of days. Will hit one of the next releases.
Also: reports on laggy behaviour / different experiences depending on hardware configs - point well taken. That already is a top priority for the team and should show results broadly second half of the year (broadly as in: not limited to new Import and Export screens).
I really appreciate how the conversation has taken a turn - thank you.
Patrick
PS: as someone suggested the thread should be moderated. It is! Whatever you still see is well above the line of what we can take any day of the week, even if it is as silly as suggesting that I should be hired by the Russian government as PR agent :-)
An error occurred while saving the comment AdminPatrick Palmer
(Director of Product Management, Pro Video and Motion Design, Adobe DVA)
commented
As several of you expressed interest in knowing how we got to data that suggests this new design is a good thing for a lot of people and why we’re not using this thread only to determine what’s next:
Pretty much all UX work goes through a similar process:
A need is identified. In this case it had to do with how many people had been baffled with how old and clunky the previous export experience was. How many weren’t able to export according to their stated intention.
User Research is done in what needs to change.
A prototype is built and refined with customers who represent our audience.
A beta is built whenever the satisfaction ratings on the prototype are high enough.
We take it to customer advisory boards. To Customer roundtables. We sit down 1:1 with a number of Adobe certified professionals. (ACPs) We iterate on what isn’t working.
It goes to public beta. This is usually when the scope is changing as we get more people to use the product hands on. It’s a large and diverse representation of our user base.
Once the satisfaction ratings are high, we consider a release.
This is how speech to text came into the product. New Captions. Remix. Multi Frame Rendering. Rotobrush. Pretty much everything you’re looking at today.
On the question as to why this thread can’t be the only signal we’re monitoring: I wish it would be this simple. There’s the already mentioned group of people that’s already participated in building the feature. all of them are users. Thousands of them. They’re voices and work is not to be ignored.
Then there’s customers we meet in person at NAB, IBC, Adobe MAX and dozens of smaller events throughout the year. They’re voices are user voices, too.
Then there’s in app statistics from millions of sessions, social sentiment, the various other forums we don’t own, LinkedIn, emails l, and this, the feature request opportunity with a voting mechanism (it is not a forum, btw - which I’m not certain is helping the conversation I’ll freely admit. We’re considering a change)
I hope this is useful in understanding some of the comments made earlier better or differently.
Cheers
PatrickAn error occurred while saving the comment AdminPatrick Palmer
(Director of Product Management, Pro Video and Motion Design, Adobe DVA)
commented
@Joe D:
the point is to have an opportunity to see what's on users' minds. It never was a forum and while I realize I've been making it one for the last couple of days, it isn't designed this way and hasn't worked this way. We're considering a switch to a different platform that will make this work better.
As for taking concerns seriously: I can't be the judge for how you perceive that, but the fact is that I've got most of my team check User Voice and plenty of other sources daily. It is not a platform where whatever is highest ranking is going to be implemented or where the loudest voice in the room wins. We have to make sure to balance all signals we're getting.
@Igor: point well taken. A lot of effort is underway for both Ae and Pr. If you've been using Ae since we switched it to multiframe rendering I hope you can experience the difference.
@Selena:
as I said, I've deleted what was outright hateful. But I stand by my comment that even rude and harsh comments are not helping the conversation. On the contrary. If you find that to be an excuse to evade the conversation: I'm here. We're talking. My higher ups do care, too. And I'm not far from their desks, either. If this doesn't produce the results you're looking for, fine. But let's just stop pretending that things aren't what they're supposed to be because the people in this company don't care.As for people who like the designs not showing up here: that's the same for everything that some don't like at all and some others find just fine. You rarely see anyone but the people who've got an issue enter the conversation. It doesn't mean anything in terms of representation of the user base. All you're getting is confirmation bias.
It is also a fact that people who have positive or optimistic comments on anything anywhere are nowadays very frequently attacked, and therefore stop commenting altogether - you can file that as another excuse. I know this to be true for many of my friends in the industry who are simply tired of the lack of respect for people who see things any other way but whoever is driving the conversation.
I've already said this in another comment, but let me repeat this here: 125 votes on User Voice matter. But it's one signal out of many. And we've got millions of users.
I'm looking at thousands of data points from well over 3 years, and they're simply telling a different story than this thread. Again, doesn't mean I don't get the criticism. Doesn't mean we can't improve for the needs of this group. But what seemingly is the attitude here that we don't listen to users or don't care is just as far from the truth as it gets.
I'll give you something that's easy to look into that just happened: we just went to NAB. We've shown the new user experience. On stage, in private meetings, in 1:1 sessions. We've had thousands of conversations over the course of the week. It's just a simple fact that we didn't walk away from them thinking that we shouldn't release this experience.
An error occurred while saving the comment AdminPatrick Palmer
(Director of Product Management, Pro Video and Motion Design, Adobe DVA)
commented
Some more answers before we all break for the weekend. This is the brief version of what I sent to some of you as direct replies, thought that some of this might be useful to everyone to add more transparency to the conversation.
Q: „Can you explain why adding a Legacy option—which the PhotoShop team did after a similar workflow overhaul that resulted in similar feedback—is not on the table?“
It effectively already exists in Media Encoder - and that interface won't change anytime soon.
I don't think we've been saying that a legacy option is out of the question, but we are saying that we have enough evidence that he new design despite a number of shortcomings in its initial release is the path forward for the vast majority of users.
The number of people who've expressed concern on User Voice and other places is being heard - but please hear me when I say that a 200 of votes on user voice are just a single data point. We have millions of users, there's a lot more signal that we've got to work with and make sure we come up with a balanced response.
Q: „But the simple ability to see the contents of a folder during render location selection and to adopt a pre-existing filename has been removed in the latest UI update... so now i have to separately go digging through explorer to see what version of a file i'm up to.“
If you click on "Location", it does open a Finder / Explorer window. You can see the content of that folder. Using a pre-existing file name works against keeping that separate from reving on the existing name already defined in the export UI - but it's something we can consider changing for sure.
Q: “When selecting a LUT to export with, it always says "None". How did we even change the export window and this wasn't even fixed? Was it purposely skipped?
LUT management as a whole is being looked at by the team, sorry if this part to it isn't commented on yet.
Q: “First of all, I have been using Premiere for 15 years and not once was I presented with or was aware of the public beta. Nobody I have spoken with in my industry was aware of it either“.
I hear you on the lack of promotion for the pubic beta. While I think we mentioned it in pretty much every session at Adobe MAX, NAB and pretty much every other place we go to for engaging with customers, there's certainly lots of other places to promote it. FWIW, it is dead simple to find: your Creative Cloud Desktop application has a segment on the left that's showing all the beta versions currently available to you.
Q: “There is no reason for a giant preview window in the export screen. The only reason you need to watch something fullscreen is for quality control which you should have done before you got to the export screen, or after it's been turned into a file. That is not what's important when selecting export options. It pushes all the important stuff (settings, filename, location, export button) to the edges of the screen away from my focus locus.“
Q: It wouldn't be so bad if I could just hit Enter to start the encoding, but I'm aghast that that common-sense function is missing.
as for not being able to hit Enter: it's CMD + Enter. If we were to use just enter, it would be easy enough to conflate a file name commit or other actions you can confirm with enter with a commitment to render.
Q: There is no reason for a giant preview window in the export screen. The only reason you need to watch something fullscreen is for quality control which you should have done before you got to the export screen, or after it's been turned into a file. That is not what's important when selecting export options. It pushes all the important stuff (settings, filename, location, export button) to the edges of the screen away from my focus locus.
As for the giant preview screen: we put that in by user request. It seems useful to the vast majority of users. I am hoping to beef it up and show the impact of choices for compression in the future.
And as indeed selecting your output prefs is more important, the preview sits to the right. Typical way of generating UX to allow for order and focus. Doesn't mean it is working for you, just trying to be transparent about what we've learned is working for most.
An error occurred while saving the comment AdminPatrick Palmer
(Director of Product Management, Pro Video and Motion Design, Adobe DVA)
commented
Folks, let me chime in and explain some of the thinking behind the new import and export experience.
Before I do: I am concerned about the tone in this thread. Let's be professional about it, and let's all assume that absolutely nobody is stupid or careless or reckless or anything else in that category - on either side of the fence.
With that out of the way, some facts that you all should be aware of:
- we have done user research on both import and export for well over three years. The reason we were considering a change is simple: too many people reported UX difficulties with both. And contrary to what some suggest, this was not about people who aren't pros. Let's keep in mind there's more than one kind of pro in the video business - and yes, absolutely, some of them just got started. As Industry peers, we all should care about those coming in, moving up.
- The new user experience has been in public beta for almost 8 months - and there's been a ton of changes. We only released the new experience after achieving high success and satisfaction ratings.
- Reducing mouse mileage and reducing cognitive load was a primary target. While that has variation depending on existing muscle memory, and while by all means the outcome will be different on what it is you frequently need to do, we have done enough user testing to know that the new experience is orders of magnitude better on average compared to what we've had before
- Import has been designed as an alternate way of getting started - you can still use the MediaBrowser from within Premiere Pro instead. Or use Finder / Explorer and drag and drop into your bins. Just like before. If there's anything in the old ways that you think you can't do because of us adding a new Import experience, let's talk.
- Export has changed to embrace what's true for most of the industry: the destination of a file has become a lot more important. Why would you want to look at lots of options if they're not meaningful to the destination you are targeting? Again, this has tested very well with a very large audience we asked to help with both the design and the implementation.
So, Import shouldn't get in the way, really. And I personally like that beginners have now a much higher chance of success by looking at something that's highly visual. That has nothing to do with dumbing things down as many have suggested, it's simply more modern. Export is a different story, as it's a replacement indeed, so let me ask you this:
To those who think it's too much work to get to all the settings in export the way it's presented in the new environment: I'd love to understand why you have to do that with high frequency. Is there a reason not to use the preset system once you've got the correct settings? Is there a reason to even go to the full export menu after you've got all the presets you need for the various clients you're working with (why not put the presets into quick export?)
Let me wrap up by saying that my team doesn't think we're done yet making this work for as many people as we possibly can, but given the success rate of both import and export with a very wide audience as we clearly see outside of this thread, there's indeed no path of simply rolling this back. Let's keep a productive conversation going, please - and we'll notify you as soon as further improvements roll out in public beta.
Sincerely,
Patrick -
1,602 votesUnder Review ·AdminPatrick Palmer
(Director of Product Management, Pro Video and Motion Design, Adobe DVA)
responded
Thanks for all the feedback. It’s pretty clear that we’ve got to look into the workflow using this format more closely, there are enough reports about gaps at this point to reopen this item. I’ll post more info about next steps shortly. In the meantime, a couple of questions are easy to answer:
- The plugin is designed for Premiere Pro. It currently doesn’t provide support for After Effects.
- It does work with AME, so if you want to use it for batch processing, that’s very doable
- If you’ve started a project with Autokroma, there’s no easy way to transfer it to be running with the new plugin.Patrick
An error occurred while saving the comment AdminPatrick Palmer
(Director of Product Management, Pro Video and Motion Design, Adobe DVA)
commented
A couple of quick comments around some of the questions that have come up so far:
- point well taken on the radio silence that's been going on for a while
- For the limited testing that I've done myself, performance seems just fine. But by all means, check it out and let us know if you're running into any issues
- AME workflows are covered for all I know, will confirm with engineering asap, stay tunedPatrick
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3 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment AdminPatrick Palmer
(Director of Product Management, Pro Video and Motion Design, Adobe DVA)
commented
I suggest to talk to your account manager and get in touch with either your Adobe CSM or someone from the strategic development team who's working with you.
Enterprise Licenses have terms that are agreed to by both sides. Unless your contract has been changed, there should be no change to deployment such as described above.
Hello everyone,
once more, thanks for all the thoughtful comments this week. I've been able to speak with some of you 1:1, and that gave me great insight into what's missing beyond what's stated here already.
We have updates in the works, some of them are guaranteed to happen (such as seeing and repurposing the file name from the finder or explorer window, using ENTER to commit instead of CMD + ENTER, remembering last settings), some others need a couple of revisions by the design team. I'll keep you posted.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
Patrick