The New Xbox Experience - What You Want to Know Options

[Xbox-Scene]

The New Xbox Experience - What You Want to Know Posted by XanTium | September 12 14:44 EST | News Category: Xbox360

From the Xbox PR Blog: [QUOTE] Many of those who got to attend PAX got a look at the New Xbox Experience - specifically the dashboard. Now it's everyone else's turn to get the goods on what's coming your way. Even those who saw the demo will learn some new things. Every Friday, we want to bring you information that will hopefully answer some of the questions you've been asking. Granted, we may not have something every single week but check back, anyway. After all, you don't want people to point and laugh at your lack of knowledge, right? For our first week we wanted to show you how the Games Played slot will look in the New Xbox Experience. It will become obvious for the next few Wednesdays that my team is Gamerscore obsessed. Let's be honest, with high Achievement counts, it was sometimes a pain having to scroll through all of them to see how well we were doing. Once the New Xbox Experience launches that will all change. When you click on your Gamercard in the New Xbox Experience you will see some familiar options; your messages will be accessible, you will be able to edit your profile or update your Avatar, manage your account, switch profiles (if you have multiple profiles) and change the Theme (more on Themes in the coming weeks). From here you will also be able to see every game you've played on your Xbox 360. Check out the screen shot up there (click it for different sizes). The team has created a mock account for Major Nelson (Yes, we know the Gamerscores don't match up on his account but that is because we created this screen shot on a build that is still being worked on). The first card shows all of the Achievements you've unlocked and lists out your overall Gamerscore and the highest possible Gamerscore you could have based on the games you've played. To the right of that every game you've played will have its own card that fans out. If you've played 3 games (like this account has), you will have 3 cards. 500 games? All 500 will fan out on your screen. You can check out what Achievements you've unlocked per game and what you have left to work on. [/QUOTE]

[bucko]

Can't be far now surely to release date?? Please announce it MS XD

[scuba156]

Can't be far now surely to release date?? Please announce it MS XD

definitely within a month, my guess is the 28th of September or the 11th of October.

its looking good, i can wait to try it out

[Tiuk]

definitely within a month, my guess is the 28th of September or the 11th of October.

its looking good, i can wait to try it out

Last year the "fall" update was released in early December. The year before I think it was the end of October. So I wouldn't hold my breath.

[luther349]

looks more like a vista areo interface then a wii menu ripoff.

[darkshadow2k8]

theres probly no reason to hack it now since its gonna release soon o well its looking good

[machopeewee]

I thought for sure I read somewhere that its coming in november.

[bucko]

Well doesn't one of the new Scene It games coming out support avatars or something?? Surely it have to be out for that.

[johnnyrico]

looks fancy, but I do find it looks a lot aero-ish with a touch of Wii.

can we still use the classic interface if we wish?

[disrockerdude]

looks fancy, but I do find it looks a lot aero-ish with a touch of Wii.

can we still use the classic interface if we wish?

I heard that this new dash isnt mandatory so im guessing you can switch to the old dash if you wanted to,

btw this looks wayy better than when they presented the new dash on e3

[scottylans]

That dash may look pretty but fuck is it a waste of screen real estate! Lower sized TV owners are going to be PISSED.
Just another Vista aero then, looks, not usability.

[LockmanSal]

definitely within a month, my guess is the 28th of September or the 11th of October.

its looking good, i can wait to try it out

i bet it will be released the week before gears of war 2 gets released.

[johnnyrico]

I heard that this new dash isnt mandatory so im guessing you can switch to the old dash if you wanted to,

btw this looks wayy better than when they presented the new dash on e3

cool, good to know, I know I like the looks of the current dash better

[bucko]

I heard that this new dash isnt mandatory so im guessing you can switch to the old dash if you wanted to,

btw this looks wayy better than when they presented the new dash on e3

kinda but you have to have a disk in the drive to start up the new guide which is like blades

[MrFish]

I heard that this new dash isnt mandatory so im guessing you can switch to the old dash if you wanted to,

btw this looks wayy better than when they presented the new dash on e3

Nope, it's mandatory. Said so on one of the Inside Xbox pages after E3.

As compensation, the short-tap blade is getting beefed up, and should be capable of everything the current dashboard does now. Albeit in a centered window that gets only a quarter of the screen, on top of a game that's making the thing sound like a hairdryer.




Bring back Bill Gates. Balmer is a complete arse, and just can't stop shitting out horrible UI after horrible UI.

Vista*, and now the New Xbox Experience, seem to be a product of the following thought process:

- Apple is cool
- Apple makes shiny computers for idiots
- If we make shiny shit for idiots, we will be cool too

Neglecting two obvious points: 1) when it comes to computers and set-top-boxes, Apple's market share is negligible, and thus copying them is not necessarily a fantastic idea, and 2) the iPod owes its success not to pretty flippy album covers, but to excellent hardware design, tight integration with the computer, and extensive testing so that it just-works, and most of the stuff you'd want to do with it happens automatically when you plug it in. Simply copying the eyecandy, and neglecting the usability and reliability is not going to work.

The screenshot in this article is an excellent example of eyecandy over usability: fully a third of the screen is wasted displaying a green and black room. The tabs overlap each other so you can only read the first two, and there's a stupid dancing office assistant over the top of the rest of them anyway. If you think the user needs to read four tabs, then make them legible; if you don't, then don't display them in the first place, but instead make whatever they do need to see as clear as you can possibly make it.

For great UI design, look at Morrowind on the Xbox (not Oblivion on the 360; Oblivion's UI is shit). It doesn't waste space, but it also doesn't display extraneous information. It's aimed at the experienced user, because that's what the majority of users are: sure they were beginners at some point, but because the interface is logical and consistent, they learned it quickly and they're not beginners any more. Doing stuff they'd find annoying, just to make someone who'd never seen it before go oooh would be crazy.

Now imagine taking giving Morrowind's tabs the New Xbox Experience: instead of the one you're interested in getting the whole screen, it now gets only a third. The others you're not interested in are all lurking behind it, in Glorious 3D, albeit so small that you can't read them even if you wanted to. Which you don't. And anyway, you can't see them because your Player Character is taking up the other half of the screen standing in front of them and shuffling. Wouldn't that be terrible? Yes it would. You've got so caught up in making it pretty that it no longer actually works as a user interface.

* I'm not going to dump that much on Vista, because it's clearly a product of desperation. If Microsoft had put in any features or applications that people actually wanted (for instance any of the stuff now standard in OSX and Linux distributions), they'd just get sued again for 'anticompetitive business practices'.


The only compensation to this whole debacle is that it makes the perpetrators of that XBMC skin look like a bunch of tits.