How do you completely redesign a product that has led an industry for more than two decades and is used by millions of people around the globe to get work done every day? And further still, how do you create a connected ecosystem of products and services — a new cloud — that spans desktop and devices, all the while providing a natural and modern user experience?
https://www.youtube.com/embed/rahSYl9vxFU?rel=0
Is it possible to improve on paper itself — a medium that has served billions of people adequately for more than two millennia? Is it feasible to design software that takes the place of, and improves upon, paper in all important respects — i.e., naturally touchable, writable, shareable, fileable, and signable — in order to make life just a little bit simpler in a complex, digital-first world?
The answer was a resounding yes. This became even clearer as the XD team labored away in their creative studio for the better part of the past two years, leading to the debut of Adobe Document Cloud today.
We recently sat down with Jamie Myrold — who has served as Director of Experience Design at Adobe for over ten years, innovating across a wide range of product lines — about spearheading the new design of Adobe Document Cloud and Acrobat DC.
Q: Jamie, what inspired you and the Adobe XD team to engage in such a thorough revision of Acrobat for the new Adobe Document Cloud?
Jamie Myrold: The project really started a couple of years ago with a focus on refreshing Acrobat’s visual language, since the UI hadn’t changed much since the major overhaul in Acrobat 10. We wanted to reduce, simplify, and flatten the interface—eliminating bevels, drop shadows, lines, and multicolored and complex icons—to make the product feel more contemporary and touch-friendly.
Q: What were some of the main ideas you decided were most important to focus on?
Q: As part of making PDF’s feel “natural,” how did your team approach that and the desire to reduce the amount of paper used by today’s office workers?
JM: That began with us working on a concept for being able to easily fill and sign forms on a mobile device, specifically on iPad. We tried to make that experience feel like writing directly on a virtual piece of paper with your finger or with a stylus and not like you were typing in and filling in a lot of fields. We also really worked on improving Acrobat’s OCR technology to better recognize and understand the different aspects of a form, like a line or a checkbox. The main reason for this, from a user-experience perspective, was for Acrobat DC to do a lot of the heavy lifting for the user by leveraging autofill and similar capabilities. You could say that one of our guiding principles was to make PDF actually better than paper, and I think we’ve come a long way toward achieving that.
Q: What do you feel most distinguishes the user experience of Acrobat DC over previous versions of Acrobat?
Q: Any final thoughts?
JM: What we have done with the user experience of Acrobat DC is much more than a redesign of a single desktop application. It’s really the integration of all of our desktop functionality, cloud-based services, and mobile apps into a much broader solution that ties everything together within the Adobe Document Cloud. And I think people are going to love it.