Remember the “blades” operating system?
That was nice, wasn’t it? In retrospect the original Xbox 360 dashboard
may not have been the most attractive, but you could get everything you
wanted from it quickly and easily. It was built with gamers in mind,
designed from the ground up to make our online lives a little easier.
But then everything started to go wrong.
Unfortunately,
Microsoft seems to have been on a mission to undo all of its good work
ever since. It has introduced a couple of major redesigns that have
brought more adverts and more non-game-related apps, while major gaming
services have been buried or removed entirely. It’s a sorry state of
affairs.
In an effort
to evolve the Xbox 360 from a console into an entertainment hub,
Microsoft has forgotten the people that helped establish the brand in
the first place: Us.
It’s pretty easy to identify where it all went wrong. In December last year, Microsoft introduced a new dashboard
designed to reflect the look of the Metro operating system used on
Windows Phones and in Windows 8. Undoubtedly attractive, the tile-based
redesign has been an absolute nightmare for users.
The
first complaints focused on the amount of advertising. The new layout
provides space on every single page that is dedicated to advertisements.
Indeed, in many cases more space is given to ads than actual features.
It means that users have to wade through all of the extraneous fluff
before they can get to what they really want. It’s intrusive and
usability suffers as a result.
This
is accentuated by the design of the thing. If you want to launch a game
from your library then you have to scroll past the Home, Social and
Video tabs, before then clicking on My Games to get to what you actually
want. Rather than making playing games - on your games console - the
most immediate function, the redesign instead prioritises entirely
non-game-related features.
Written Friday, May 04, 2012 By Lee Bradley
Source: xbox360achievements.org
