Photoshop Elements - User Interface

In my recent experimentation with Photoshop Elements 6 (PSE6), I was quite surprised by some of the user interface (UI) techniques employed.

For example, with the "Albums" and "Keyword Tags" palettes, there is a "New" button, as shown below - the bright green cross -



When you hover, the tooltip text shows as below:


But what if you wanted to collapse or expand the tree? There doesn't seem to be any actions available for that. Let's click the "New" button - which is a pull-down, and see what happens ...



Aaahhh. There they are. At the bottom of the "New" menu.

what the?

It seems that it's basically overloading that first tool bar button. I'm not sure why. For fear of cluttering up the tool bar perhaps.

An alternative would be to make the buttons explicit - perhaps like the Eclipse style ones shown here (as the boxed "-" and "+"):



A little more thought needs to go into style guides for these interfaces I think.