If the 360’s new dashboard, which was announced during E3 in June and launches tomorrow, has any particular watchword, it’s consistency. The fresh design, called Metro, brings it in line with the UI conventions of Windows Phone 7 and the forthcoming Windows 8, being built from media-rich tiles. Every consumer-facing interface from Microsoft will now look much the same: no bad thing considering Metro is both practical and handsome, and that it hardly represents a massive leap from the current dash’s design anyway.
But Microsoft’s unified cross-product UI is just the surface of the new dash’s commitment to consistency. The real key is that Metro extends to every app, thirdparty or first, that will run on it. The core navigation behaves and looks - aside from branding - the same everywhere, with a bar at the top of the screen and tiles below that you can sweep between. That goes for both Channel 4’s 4OD catch-up TV service, Lovefilm’s on-demand video and Sky’s TV streaming service.
Throughout 2012, Microsoft will be releasing new ones through an App Marketplace on a monthly basis. Don’t get too excited about some sort of App Store free-for-all landing on the console - as with all things 360, the Marketplace is very locked-down, developed by a combination of thirdparties and Microsoft. And most will be concerned with video like YouTube and BBC iPlayer (finally coming in 2012) - others will be based on music like Last.fm, and social services like Twitter and Facebook. Yes, the latter three are already available on 360 - but Microsoft’s been working with a roster of 51 service providers worldwide.
When you consider how closely the apps have been integrated with the 360 overall, you realise their development - and that of the new dash - has been a major undertaking for Microsoft. Parental controls are consistent across apps so that none will display content that’s above what you’ve set on the active profile. Video controls are identical in each app. And they integrate neatly with Bing, Microsoft’s search system, too. Search for ‘Batman’, for instance, and you’ll be presented with a list of all available content that matches, whether games or movies, regardless of content type. Selecting ‘Show everything’ on Batman’s 95 search results and you’ll see the results segmented by content type. Select the first Tim Burton film and, magnanimously, you’ll get a list of the service providers that list it - not just Microsoft’s own Zune, but Lovefilm or Sky’s TV service and wherever else.
Comments
2Today I got the new Xbox 360 dashboard myself. After checking it out for about 30/45 minutes with a friend in a Live party we came to the conclusion that the new interface has potential but at the moment is a bit of a mess.
Since I'm living in The Netherlands I will only talk about the features that the Xbox has for my region at this moment. I also like to point out that I don't have and probably never will have a Kinect sensor.
-1st tab "bing"
The search engine works but spelling errors will break it. I tried 'hallo' instead of 'halo' which resulted in one result for a Mass Effect 2 skin pack. Searching the query ' hallo xbox' on Google.com resulted in the website asking me if I didn't meant searching for 'halo xbox'.
-2nd tab "home"
For a paid subscription service I think it is a pretty bold move to put advertisements on the biggest tile and opening screen of your device. It makes me wonder what Windows 8 metro interface will have in store for us. Personally I think Microsoft is over doing it with these prominent ads that you can't turn off. I think the two right tiles of this screen are also reserved for ads. This is just to much and the abbreviation M$ comes to mind.
Secondly I don't understand why they had to switch the X and Y configuration for the game tile. X button has always been open tray and now this has been switched with Y... why?
-3rd tab "social"
Apparently avatar props aren't important anymore. They have been removed from this screen and can only be seen if you select a individual friend or your own avatar.
I've also seen some tile inconsistency, so I'll start explaining that here. The apps on the social tab are called "social apps" but on the movie tab they are called "my video apps". The tabs games and apps also use the "my" suffix.
Jumping into my own avatar you get to a screen where you can do stuff with messages, your avatar and change your theme. I know that this was also the case with the last dashboards but I still can't understand why you would be changing your theme here and not in the settings tab.
-4th tab "video"
Again a lot of ads. But in this tab I don't mind them that much because being tied with a video streaming services means you gotta show what's on offer.
What I do mind however is that Zune isn't integrated with the dashboard. Choosing (Zune) Video Marketplace prompts me with a installer or if already installed loads Zune. This takes time and is very annoying. Even more so because getting out of Zune also takes time. And it asks you if you really really want to do this. Secondly if I have this tile selected, the button legend in the bottom of the screen tells me that "A" selects the tile and not something like "starts Zune". This problem becomes even bigger because the "Inside Xbox" tile in the upper right corner won't bring me to Zune but opens a "inside Xbox" menu. However before selecting it I have no way of knowing what will happen.
-5th tab "games"
Advertisements yadayadayada.
Here pressing X is launching a game while on the home screen pressing A is launching my game in the dvd player, in my opinion this is odd.
I can also select "Show" which is a filter to select types of games. The selection for Indie games here is rather odd because these type of games are STILL NOT AVAILABLE in my region. So I see this as a localisation error. By the way Edge I would really like if you guys would be more critical about localisation differences on Xbox.
Then I took a quick look at the game marketplace. For some reason Microsoft decided that it would be a good idea not to use Xbox themed icons here to indicate what is part of the Xbox and what is more content related. Tiles like "new releases", "game type" ,"Kinect games" and "most popular" should have green dashboard like icons in my opinion. And I know Microsoft can do it because they did do it for the "genre" and "A-Z" tile.
Tile location is also a small concern here because it isn't consistent between tabs. The "games" and "add-ons" tabs have a lot of the same tiles but in a slightly different configuration..
And again the button legend should be much more informative of what is going to happen! selecting a tile with a yeti on it in the "extras" tab opens up the avatar editor, which again is stand-alone program and takes time open and close.
I always like checking out demos of new games so I selected the "new releases" tile on the demo tab. Here I can find a long list of demos in chronological order but for some reason I can't do this for Arcade games. Not here and not anywhere else.
-6th tab "apps"
Not sure what the future will bring for this tab. But for now I see a huge tile for Video Kinect, something I have absolutely no use for because I don't have a Kinect. Why doesn't the Xbox remove this tile as long as I don't have a Kinect connected to my console.
Going into the apps marketplace and selecting "show all" showed me only the Zune app. But one screen ago I already saw Facebook, Twitter and Video Kinect. I guess my definition of all is not the same one that Microsoft uses.
-7th tab "settings"
No ads, nope not even for Xbox geniuses to install your Xbox at a special offer.
What I do find annoying about the menu structure is that some tiles open menus in the dashboard interface and some tiles choose to open option menus in the guide interface. And loading the guide interface takes time and seems useless here and almost everywhere else by the way.
The video and music player (and for that matter Zune) are all still very limited. Video lacks good codec support and the audio player still doesn't allow navigation using a file structure like it does with videos. This would be a god send because searching for albums and playlists still doesn't work well. This last point is however more a Windows Mediaplayer 11 related problem.
As a final note I would like to point out the huge amounts of space that are unused in this interface.
as someone who has been using the interface for the last year with my WP7 samsung ominia 7, i am very intune with the changes. I can udnerstand someone people are having hard time coming to terms but now i have gone tiles i will never buy another phone platform and hope that they get the tiles to the same proficiency as windows phone tiles.