Why does Serif seem to ignore user usability?

[OSunBoy]

I’ve been using Affinity Designer for a while now in my work as a graphic designer. I haven’t been in the industry for long—quite the opposite, I’ve only just started applying myself commercially—but even so, I have a solid foundation in graphic design. I have some brief experience with Photoshop, but that’s about it. What I mean by this is that I’m the ideal user for Affinity because I don’t carry the baggage of Photoshop/Illustrator that many others do, leading them to make comparisons, especially when they encounter something different in Affinity. My professional design journey is beginning now, using Serif’s tools.

Because of this, intuitive usability is one of the most important things for me. During the time I used Photoshop, I didn’t have many issues with this. When I had something to do, my intuition guided me, and I did it—it worked. But in Affinity Designer, I’ve encountered so many non-intuitive things that I can’t even remember them all.

As a result, I’ve spent a lot of time watching tutorials online and reading forums. This is normal, I know, but the problem is that this applies to very simple tasks. I’ve had to watch tutorials to accomplish things that should be straightforward.

For example, Affinity Designer exports artboards from bottom to top in PDF format. This means that in the layers panel, the first layer will be the last one displayed, and the last layer will be the first. This simply doesn’t make sense from a user’s perspective.

This leads to another problem: the developers’ reluctance to take usability feedback into account. There have been so many times when I was reading the forum, where a user raised a usability issue, and the developers responded by justifying their design choices with programmer logic, not user logic. In the example mentioned above, a user brought up this issue eight years ago, and a programmer did exactly what I’m talking about. And to this day, there’s no way to export artboards in the usual order. It’s frustrating, to say the least.

This is a direct critique of some of the usability choices made by the developers and their reluctance to listen to users and design the software for users (not for themselves). I’ve seen many complaints along these lines, but I’ve never seen a post specifically about this, which is why I decided to raise the issue myself.

Despite all this, I like Affinity and intend to continue using it, but that’s because I’ve had the patience to work around these flaws and I haven’t intensively used Adobe’s tools before. For a user with more experience in other software, these problems are likely even more pronounced.

Edited August 26 by OSunBoy
The text is the same, but since I'm not a native English speaker, I had to revise it to fix a few things and make it more fluent.