Acrobat 8: UI menu changes
In our latest interview with a member of the Acrobat team at Adobe, I talked recently with Heather Winkle, manager of the User Experience Group that developed and implemented the new streamlined user interface (UI) in the Acrobat 8 product line.
Heather talked about the goals and challenges of the makeover process.
“The Acrobat interface was extremely complicated,” she says. “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.’”
Of course, long-time users of Acrobat will need to discover where some menus, tools and features have been relocated in the new version. One example is the top-level menu structure for the Advanced section, comparing Acrobat 7 Professional (top) with Acrobat 8 Professional (bottom).
To aid in the rediscovery process, the User Experience team provided an illustrated chart–available for download–that summarizes the menu structure changes from version 7.0.8 to 8.0.
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