Why is ArcGIS Pro so hard to learn?

[Anonymous User]

Hello everyone,

So this isn't meant to be a rant...I'm honestly interested in this from a quasi-scientific - how our brains work angle. I have been using ArcGIS Pro for a year and a half now. I'm an "old" (aged 40) ArcMap user. I do not have time to do Esri trainings to learn Pro - I have work to do. So I jumped in with no training and learn as I go. Many of you are probably similar. So my question to you is - why is ArcGIS Pro so hard to learn?

Here's today's example - open a style set and sort the items in the style set alphabetically by name. I couldn't do this intuitively. Isn't that insane? I had to google how to sort it alphabetically. Am I just "old" and my brain doesn't work "the new way"?! 🙂  (What my brain wanted to do was right click the items and click "sort"! That must be an ArcMap thing. There is no right click sort - go ahead, try it, ha!)

Thanks all,

Andrea

[Brian_Wilson]

It's like Mac vs Windows. Apple seems to go the extra distance. Microsoft chases Apple year after year and tries to copy features and then gets them wrong.

Microsoft and Esri seem to have a "we'll finish it later" attitude. Maybe if they turned out finished products we'd stop coming back every year for the updates?

(40 = old ha ha ha)

[jcarlson]

Generally speaking, the more a piece of software is capable of doing, the harder it is to make it "intuitive".

For myself, Pro has not been difficult to learn, but I came into it with no ArcMap experience at all, and I only use a small subset of its features in my work. That's another sticking point for lots of folks, that the software is supposed to be able to do everything that ArcMap can, so even keeping track of what features are the same, which ones aren't in Pro, which ones have different names, and which ones have slightly different buttons or interfaces... well, it's a lot. You'd be forgiven for finding it a hard transition from software that you probably have many years of experience with. Brand new is easier to learn than a massive change from something similar.

I don't know what your workload is, but you should be open with your employer about getting time to train. If they want you to perform your best work, then they need to allocate an appropriate amount of time for you to keep up with changing technology. Basically forcing you to learn complex software as you go is bad management, in my opinion.

Oh and to your example, just click the header. Having not come from ArcMap, I didn't even think to right-click, I just always click on table headers and assume sorting will happen. So there's another example of ArcMap / ArcGIS Pro differences that are harder to change than learn from scratch.

[Anonymous User]

Thanks, @jcarlson I figured it was an ArcMap-learned habit. That's so funny that you don't think to right - click. I mean - does this look like something I'm supposed to know I can click on?! lol. You can click all day on the ArcMap interface and it won't do anything. 🙂 

[SteveCole]

Agree with everything mentioned so far. I'm also from the Arcmap entrenched camp and will not fully migrate to Pro until it's no longer possible to use Arcmap. For me, it's a bad UI design. Every action sets off a game of Where's Waldo as you work to catch up with where you're supposed to click next-

left screen click->right screen click-> top ribbon pane click....

The movement to the calcite based help documentation also has eliminated a lot of detail that used to be present in the help documentation. I'd much prefer the level of detail and organization of a 9.x or even early 10.x ArcGIS Help Doc over the current system.

[Anonymous User]

For me it's the UI design as well. No Zen of Python or Unix Philosophy to be found here...

Like @Brian_Wilson said about Microsoft chasing Apple. But ESRI is chasing nobody. Everybody else has a ribbon and a notification/popup bell so I guess we should too. They just serve no purpose other than cognitive overheard for the user. Sure in ArcMap I had 40 buttons of toolbars but at least I put those there, organized them, and know what they did. Thumbs up on the docs as well especially the new arcpy docs.

[JoshuaBixby]

I can agree with you on the help.  Over time, the help has gotten less technical and more fluffy, for lack of a better term.  More pages and more words doesn't always make for better documentation.

[jcarlson]

Just to add another comment on here, for those folks who, like me, don't like playing Where's Waldo with the ribbon tabs. Pro does let you customize the ribbon, and while it can be time-consuming to set up initially, it's possible to make your own tab of the ribbon with all the buttons and tools that you actually need, and then you can ignore the other tabs entirely.

For my work, there are only about 2 dozen things across all the ribbon tabs that I ever click on, so being able to put those all in 1 spot, and not having all the other things I don't use, is really nice.

[DucksInaRiver]

Do you have any insight as to why a customized ribbon may then have the carefully curated collection of tools completely grayed out and unusable? That was my most recent experience on that front. 

[SteveCole]

Maybe because they're still context sensitive? For example, a tool might be related to rasters so you still have select a raster layer in the TOC in order to activate the tool.

That being said, I still recall instances where I wanted to place a tool in Arcmap someplace else and typically there might be multiple versions of that command, depending on context (think of the Properties for the Data Frame, Properties of a graphic object, etc).  If you chose the wrong one, it would still be greyed out even though you expect it to be enabled.