Xbox Is Finally Making Changes To Its Console UI, But Will That Be Enough?

Xbox Is Finally Making Changes To Its Console UI, But Will That Be Enough?

Xbox is testing a series of new UI “experiments” it hopes to deploy across its Series X, Series S, and Xbox One platforms in 2023. Some of these new features will start rolling out to randomly selected Insider members over the weekend.

“We know the Xbox homepage is where our gamers spend a lot of their time, and it’s a space that’s very personal,” read a statement from senior product manager lead Ivy Krislov in the Xbox Wire post. “We also know we can always be listening and learning how we can do better here while keeping your experience fast and familiar.”

Xbox says it will be conducting a “multi-month series of experiments to learn how to create a more personalised home screen experience and address some of the top trends and fan requests.”

But what will these experiments look like? According to Xbox, they’ll manifest in different ways. The overall homepage layout, or the design of its individual floating blocks might change. They might try out new accessibility options, like the Jump Back In row you can see in the hero pic on this article, that should let players rejoin any game they’ve recently played. System apps like Store, Search, Settings, and My Games & Apps will receive Home tiles of their own.

The goal, Microsoft says, is to “keep the experience familiar”. Therefore, we wouldn’t expect to see anything approaching a major overhaul. Rather, the focus will be on nips and tucks, small adjustments to streamline the existing UI and make it easier to get around.

The current version of the Xbox UI has been around since the launch of the Xbox One X in 2017. It’s the best UI Xbox has had since the launch of the Xbox One and its godawful Windows 8 tiles, but that still isn’t really saying much.

xbox ui
Remember this? Image: Microsoft

Compared to the UI on the Switch and the PlayStation 5, the current Xbox UI is busy, cluttered, and far from intuitive. Imagine trying to find your way around it as a normie, someone who is not fully immersed in gaming as a hobby. I know it’s a struggle because I watched my non-gamer sister and brother-in-law trying to figure out how to use my launch model Xbox One as a Netflix box. It took them several minutes to figure out where the app even was.

If I may, I’d like to offer Xbox a few suggestions. Let’s get rid of the ad panels entirely. Just ditch them now and let me use that space for pins and custom groups. That Jump Back In row should scroll horizontally like the PlayStation and Switch UIs. Instead of having the Game Pass, Store, and Movies & TV tabs all on the main menu in an infinite scroll situation, let’s break them out into horizontal tabs accessible by tapping LB and RB. Let me know what changes you’d like to see in the comments. Together, we can build a better Xbox UI.

Though changes will be rolled out to Insiders fairly slowly, that program will formally begin this coming weekend. If you’re not already an Xbox Insider, you become one by downloading the Xbox Insider Hub app on your Series X/S or Xbox One console.


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