You may have seen me sharing online my joy about my brand new CS5 suite. I’ve been toying with AE, PS and Premiere Pro, and the least I can say is that CS5 is indeed a major upgrade, and it’s sweet.
But, and there’s always a but, they missed to do something good with what they started in CS4: the community help.
In CS4, when you went to the support page, you could browse/search the « official» help pages and extend your search for community help. Community help is a google search optimized and used only on websites added into the Adobe database as good sources of information. So searching for « expression» for exemple could link you to the official help page, but also to Dan Ebbert site, aenhancers forum, Creative Cow, VideoCopilot and so on… That was brilliant.
They even added the possibility for users to add comments and links directly in the official help pages to even build a better help.
On that aspect, CS4 was a breakthrough compared to CS3. So the question was how Adobe could benefit from that and bring it a step further in CS5. Well, the sad news is that they’ve done horribly wrong.
First of all, they removed the breadcrumb navigation table of content on every pages of the official help, making the browsing experience really, really bad. The Toc is still available on the home page of the official help, but if you have to go back to it everytime you want to switch to another page, it’s bad bad bad design.
Even the official support page doesn’t have a link to the official webpage in it’s main navigation bar. it is hidden under « additional help» , putting the valuable information a step further away from the user.
So you could say to yourself that you just might use the search feature to find your content. Nop, the results are not that relevant anymore, and the chance is high that it’ll give you results from other products.
Last but not least, they’ve build something that looked good on paper, but that is really bad designed for now: the community help client. It’s an Air application designed to regroup and auto-update all the help pages from your product.
How can it be bad you may ask ? Well, they have removed the table of content (Toc) from every help page, the search gives you anything but the pages you’re looking for, and the app isn’t even convenient to use. It’s so bad that I even set it’s pref to load the browser version instead.
And to be completly honest, I don’t even try to use the CS5 help page anymore, and I’m not going to add comments until it’s fixed. For now I’ll be using the CS4 help.
I’m really sad because I really enjoyed the CS4 help, and it made me add comments and join the community of people who cares. All that have been squashed away by poor design decision, and worst of all, without bringing something else to compensate.
We are now forced to access the documentation with what they think is the « good» and « only way» to do: searching. And the worst part is that the official help pages are fully loaded with good info. They just don’t want us to ready them easily anymore.
So what is the plan for the next version ? I’m betting Adobe will reduce once again the scope of it’s help, and eventally get rid of it and will only rely on community help. Sure it may never be the case, but considering they just have made an unbrowsable version of their help, and hid it under an « additional help» menu in the support page navigation bar, why wouldn’t they get rid of it ?
So if by any chance an Adobe rep finds this page, please, fix your help system, and stop trying to force us in what you think is (or what you think the metrics says is) the only paradigm. I don’ t agree with what Steve Jobs says about Adobe, but at least, he know how to design and good online help (check iTunes one for exemple)
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Thanks for the time you’ve taken to review and respond to the CS5 Help experience. I’m on the Adobe Community Help team and we value your feedback. I do want to clarify that Adobe Help, as the definitive reference for Adobe products, is a highly valued component of the overall Community Help offering, and is not endangered content. Just choose Help (or F1) from any CS5 product Help menu and you’ll arrive on the Help homepage for your product, with direct access to Adobe Help titles and TOC.
Both search and browsing are important to users and we’ve tried to design navigation systems that don’t overwhelm the content experience. For instance, the Search pane can be collapsed and TOC does not occupy content real estate when not in use.
Please be sure to update your pre-release version of the Community Help AIR application. http://www.adobe.com/support/chc/ Additional details are posted on this Adobe Community Help Forums thread: http://forums.adobe.com/message/2785553#2785553
No question, the navigation is terrible now. You cannot keep track anymore and going back requires the « back» button of the browser.
And yes, sadly i have to believe that Adobe just always thinks what’S good and right for their users.
They’re wrong! They might have good business people and terrific engineers but they don’t have any objective view on their products. They cannot have because they do not work in a real worl situation with their products.
They have to listen to their users if they will create kick ass products for the future.