Adobe interview: Heather Winkle, User Experience Manager

by Kurt Foss, Editor, AcrobatUsers.com

Heather Winkle led the team that developed the new, streamlined user interface that represents one of the significant changes in Acrobat 8. While it means that some menus and tools have been relocated, the new UI is designed to be more logical, customizable and to be easier to build on in future versions, she says. To help experienced users with the reorganized menus, the User Experience team is providing for download a PDF document titled “Adobe Acrobat Menu Structure,” which illustrates and summarizes UI changes from version 7.0.8 to 8.0.

Kurt Foss: What is your current job title and role at Adobe, and briefly explain other design background and experiences that are relevant to the new Acrobat 8 user interface (UI).

Winkle: "My job title is User Experience Manager for the Knowledge Worker Business Unit (KWBU). I've been with Adobe just over a year—I came in the middle of the Acrobat 8 product cycle—right before the Macromedia acquisition—so it's been an interesting first year.

My actual training is in industrial design—product design, like fax machines or sneakers. That includes the psychology of how human beings interact with the world and objects around them, which translates very well to working with not only software and interface, but also in understanding how people try to solve problems in their real world and how we can interpret that and turn that into an interface they can use to achieve those goals. I loved what I studied and I think it's interesting I ended up in software—and that it still applies well.

I've been all over Silicon Valley—I worked at Netscape, Intuit, Yahoo! and eBay. Some of the products that I worked on give me a strong background to come to the Acrobat team. For example, I joined Intuit as the first on-staff Quicken designer. One of their problems at the time was feature usage. People were barely penetrating the top one percent of the features in Quicken, and the program had a really old interface and 15-year-old codebase. My job was to basically take apart the interface and put it back together in a way that would make sense for the wide array of users, and also in a way that could grow over time—very similar to what happened on Acrobat 8."

Foss: How large is the team you manage that works on the Acrobat user interface?

Winkle: "For Acrobat, Reader and Connect, we have a team of seven people—comprised of designers, researchers and a writer."

Foss: When did work on the Acrobat 8 UI design begin?

Winkle: "The way things have worked in the past is a little different than they worked for this product cycle, and that'll be different than the way we're doing it for Acrobat 9. This particular product cycle was impacted by the Macromedia acquisition—a lot of change happened to our design organization as a result.

Acrobat was identified as the first product to launch post-acquisition. It seemed like a good opportunity to show our commitment to putting the user first, making sure that design had a strong impact on the product.

The Acrobat interface was extremely complicated. Bits and pieces had been added on over time—you saw lots of different types of toolbars, statusbars, panels, panes and floating palettes. And the menu system clearly had been developed by every future team individually, with nobody going through and saying 'what's the pattern behind this,' 'what's the rationale for different placement,' and so on. You could really see the history in it. It needed someone to come in and take a look at it with a fresh perspective—to ask 'what's the framework,' 'what's the logic behind where everything is placed,' 'does everything on the UI have a purpose and if it doesn't, why is it there,' and 'can we remove a number of lines and pixels and stuff that's getting in the way of what people really want to do, which is work with a document.' We needed to streamline it, simplify it, make sure everything has a clear reason and rationale.

Another thing is that the Acrobat UI was starting to look a little dated. We wanted to give it some fresh life, to revitalize the icons and colors. The way one of our VPs of design describes it is that when somebody opens the application, they should say 'Ahhhhh'—you don't want them to be barraged with stuff, to have to hunt around and not to be sure what to look at first. You want them to be able to open it and not have their blood pressure go up. You want them to say 'OK, there’s my document, I know what I need to do.'

One of the motivations behind the new look and feel—an idea from one of the designers on the team—was 'OK, here's the page I'm looking at. What are the things we absolutely must have in order to work with that page? Start with the page and let the application support the page rather than the other way around.’"

Foss: Can you elaborate a bit more on some of the other primary user interface design goals for Acrobat 8?

Winkle: "Simplifying and then organizing around key task areas. During the past few years, Adobe has been pushing the taskbar with the key task areas—Create, Combine, Forms, Secure and so on—and to do more of that with Acrobat 8. Also, to modernize—bring it up to current day look and feel. Another technique was to display panels and supporting UI elements only when needed, as opposed to having them always displayed.

The other key goal was to put into place a new architecture for the UI that we can build on. One of the ways that was done was through the menu system—we took it completely apart and put it back together in a way we thought would make sense for people transitioning over [from previous versions], but that would be even easier for people getting to know the product and that would be something we can build on for the next 5-10 years. It also started to come through a little bit in the UI and the panels and in elements of the UI appearing only when they're needed as opposed to always being there.

You want to find a balance between revealing features to people, but not overwhelming them. There are just so many in Acrobat. And there are sets of tools that make sense for different processes. You can't show everything or the user won't be able to find anything. And you don't want to bury things that people might want to use all of the time. It's a tricky balance. You can see a lot of that in the Advanced menu, where we don't want to put things too deep, but at same time, everyday users don't necessarily have to go into the print production set of tools."

Foss: Please explain the UI makeover process.

Winkle: "In this case, the new design vision was proposed, and a lot of executives and other people got behind it—they saw it, liked it and thought the change was good. Then it came to me and my team.

It was tough because we were very close to the UI freeze at that point. We had to figure out the details of the main UI—how we were going to get all of the icons developed and put in. We also had to take a look at what it was going to mean for all of the different feature areas that have been developed over the past year—forms, search, shared review, security and so on. Because of the changes to the team, there were only two UI designers and two visual designers powering the work through. It was day in, day out, working hand in hand with the engineers, who at that point were done implementing and now had to go back to make the UI changes.

There were a million details: When the page opens, what does the window do, what does the width do, what's the default view percentage, what cursor do you get—those kinds of treatments—and then what happens as you resize, and what happens if you open a new document. All of those behaviors had to be figured out. Every day I would sit and work through it with two of our UI engineers. We'd try things—at that point, you have to feel it to see if it's right—so they'd do small builds just for me and the engineer and we'd just cycle through it.

I think it was good to bring in some fresh blood with fresh perspectives—people, including me, who could question assumptions and say 'Wait, why are we doing that?'

Foss: How much time is spent on actual customer testing of the UI?

Winkle: "We do testing all of the way through the process. We use different methods, depending what the questions are that the designers or product folks have, and where we are in the product cycle. Right now, for example, we're doing a lot of work on Acrobat 9 and 10—a lot of ethnographic field research, understanding real-world scenarios, user problems and pain points.

What we did in the last year of Acrobat 8 and before that, what they had been doing, was a lot of usability lab studies on prototypes—bringing people in and testing the interface. We did that very much on a feature level—we would do lots of testing on forms, for example, and then iterate on the findings. The new UI—because it happened very late in the cycle—did not get as much testing as it normally would have, but it did get tested before launch. We were crossing our fingers that we had been making well-educated, smart decisions along the way just based on having developed software, and when we finally did get folks into the lab."

Foss: Were there any special challenges related to the first integration of products from Adobe and Macromedia, with the rebranding of Breeze into the product family as Acrobat Connect?

Winkle: "It was a challenge culturally, having two teams from different companies with different working methods come together. Also, from the interface perspective, in the beginning it seemed like we were just slapping a button on, but it was a first step toward what I think is going to be a really interesting blend of the two products moving forward.

Right now, the fact that you're in Acrobat and you press a button to go to a meeting room is not necessarily the right model, but I’m glad we got the Breeze functionality into Acrobat. You're looking at a document, you're going to be talking with someone on the phone or chatting with them about it, so it makes sense to be able to share your screen with them right there. 'What do you think about this? Here, look at my screen'—and click the button and they see the screen. I think this is the first step of something that's going to be really interesting.”