Reply To: Should we start an Adobe Customers pressure group?

Re: Adobe listening, I am really baffled by what they decide is worth fixing.

The Illustrator graphing tool has not been updated since 1988. Seriously. I was at PepCon in Washington DC, I believe (or was it Austin)? and asked the Adobe Product team about graphing, and the product manager (Terry, I believe) asked the room, “who would like charts and graphs in InDesign?) LOTS of hands shot up.

Nothing was done for years, and just recently Adobe has been tinkering with the CC Charts tool in Illustrator, which allows you to make a bar chart that uses shapes, instead of bars, so you can have a graph showing 10 different sized trees, or light bulbs, or whatever. This is a BAD information design; it’s a completely wrongheaded thing to fix. Meanwhile, all of the basic graphing tools malfunction exactly as they have since Illustrator 88. You cannot enter a number with a comma, or % sign. You can’t use years as category labels unless you put them in quotes. When you update a graph the tick marks go all over the place, etc. All of this makes me feel that the people at Adobe who tell the engineers what to work on simply do not understand what it’s like to use the applications to do work. They are listening to the wrong people.

It has always seemed to me that if administrative office workers could use Adobe software to make attractive graphs, they could get a lot more corporate subscriptions. It would free us all from the tyranny of PowerPoint and Excel, which are currently the only viable option in corporate environments. So, Adobe is missing a huge market there and I simply cannot understand why they don’t address that, except to think that basic graphing is not sexy enough, while being able to resize a car is more impressive in a demo.

As for typography, I did get a conference call with the Adobe InDesign product team, and they showed me a few upcoming features that I cannot discuss. But I can say that again, they were way off the mark in terms of productivity. One or two were OK, but most were weird tweaks that didn’t seem very useful, and the things I and others have been asking for for years, such as kerning pair editor and orphan control, were not even on their radar.

So, what can you do when they refuse to listen? Once they have got you paying $50/month in perpetuity, it feels like we the user are trapped. No way out, and nobody listening. And that is very frustrating.