Dear Adobe

Product/Program managers come up with a million reasons why they could not go to users while building the product. I have heard some really stupid reasons from Project Managers: "We don't have the time. We want to ship on the so-and-so date!" is the classic refrain. Most product managers are still stuck in the stone age of software design: the 90s. They refuse to budge and the result is, well, predictable. Products that irritate users. Stupid products. And, and, and, your competition gets amazing publicity: One of the users of Dear Adobe site wrote:

Try to beat FoxIt Reader for size and load time. Go ahead and try.

Dear Adobe lists gripes against Adobe products. It makes for some fun reading but it also sends an ominous signal to Adobe. Listen to users or perish. Excerpts from Dear Adobe's Top 50 gripes:

• 1) Why does the Acrobat Reader take two minutes to launch, and require updates twice a month, just to display PDF pages?
• 6) Please create an installer that puts your software on my computer in less time than it takes to install an operating system.
• 15) Please update your Updater so that it won't take 110% of my CPU just to download some files.
• 20) I really don't want a 'My eBooks' folder. Please ask first.
• 21) Could you make Adobe Reader start up slower? I'd like to have enough time to go get a sandwich before I read a one page document.
• 22) Please stop forcing your PDF plug-ins into every orifice of OS X. Apple designed Preview for a reason. Fucking deal with it.
• 45) Why oh why is Updater.app such garbage? It's 2008 already - why do I need to close Safari so you can update InDesign, exactly?

You know the positive thing is that, Adobe Product Managers don't have invest time or effort to figure our what's wrong with their products. The users have spoken. The least they could do is listen to them. Recommended Books on Usability write to me: sumank [at] gmail [dot] com

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