Xbox Announces Plans To Make New Dashboard Feel Less 'Crowded'

For me go switch style simple and easy
No more and no less.

Thanks for the included link to the info on the insider app @fraserg

Remember when we just put a disc/cartridge inside the device, and then the game just started. That was pretty cool.

@SplooshDmg
Almost sounds like my switch 😊

Get rid of the 3 Ads at the bottom problems solved

🥱 working on they say. Hear our complaints. Doing our all they can.

Sigh what on earth are the UI team even doing at this point. People have saying this for years. Just make it clean show us our games as focus and don't the whole freaking page one giant games pass advert 😮‍💨

Why not just implement a setting to drop the tiles down and reveal the background? Or have them "go to sleep" after a set amount of time? Pull the L-trigger and they pop-up/wake-up.

That, in addition to making them smaller or more customizable.

@trev666 seems easy right? I mean that’s about all that is making it feel bloated. There is some bloat on other tab’s as well, but for the most part, just get rid of the 3 add’s and that alone makes it better, anything else would just be a bonus.

Just copy Switch or PS5. Anything targeted primarily at the games, just not this bloated multilayered mess. And limit the customization options, with great power comes great clumsiness!

That's good, but they also need to overall the Achievements. Besides the fact that the game squares/tiles are still not in 4K even after the 4K update to the dashboard last year, the listing of them is a complete mess. You have DLC mixed in with the regular achievements. They should just copy Sony and the PS5, where the trophies are listed in a very clean way with DLC usually separated from the main game trophies. Keep the progression tracking for achievements though, something that is really hit and miss on the PS5 sadly.

@SplooshDmg But then how did you know the new Old Spice flavored TLoU themed Doritos were available for a limited time? YOU DIDN'T!

@Cikajovazmaj Please not PS5, it's prettier to look at but clunkier to use! It takes 12 button presses just to get to my vr games group!

@NEStalgia it’s turning the thing off that does it for me. There’s a million buttons down, by default, that I just don’t care about.

Makes me appreciate the Xbox & Switch UIs.

@NEStalgia Oh? What's this? Have you finally returned home from the trenches of Push Square? I thought you had surely fallen during the great battle of Final Fantasy XVI State of Play. Glad to see you're still alive and well, ole chap.

Just have six squares and a customisable background.

1 - Current/Last game played
2 - Settings
3 - Game Pass
4 - XBLG
5 - Online Friends
6 - Ads and Offers

IT'S NOT TRICKY MICROSOFT!!! PLEASE!!!

Hopefully it looks neat and they remove ads. things that bothers me tho are the limit to how long you can record game clips and that you can't upload directly to YouTube. They want you to transfer to pc and upload. But it would just be better to record from the PC.

@NEStalgia PS5 Ui is a bit heavy on clicks. Like i don’t dislike it but i don’t love it either. Xbox to me is really good minus the bloat. Even the achievements page could use some trimming. Achievements in general need overhauled but that’s a different topic, i see people saying Xbox should have a Switch like Ui, problem with that is switch does like a 3rd of what a PS5 and Series X does, so there’s no way to be that light on function i don’t think. I am excited to see what Xbox does here as a good Home refresh will really make the console feel new and lighter on the eyes. To me that’s a great thing.

I know it'll never happen but I wish they'd make a complete minimalist option. All I want is a screen with a list of installed games. No pics, no ads just a straight MS DOS like roster of games and let me go on my merry way.

PS5 UI is worse than the xbox interface

everything takes so many button presses

@SplooshDmg 😂. Well most of it isn't so bad at least it's better than the console war. There's a few bad eggs but it's a generally cordial war of attrition.

It's such a WEIRD argument though. I think that might take the crown as the most toxic, cringe fan base and I lived through smash 4 and 5 and Pokemon XY.....

@ParsnipHero Oh yeah, don't get me started on the power settings. And in vr there's like a floating version of the UI that's kind of like the Xbox guide menu but middle of screen and without games launching. But that bottom icon row is still there except now it infinitely scrolls so I end up cycling through multiple times to find the power or home or notifications. They found a way to make that bad icon row worse!

@Green-Bandit heavy on button clicks is like the first no-no taught in ux 101.... 😂

@NEStalgia i mean you aren’t wrong. Sony’s Ui is a touch behind for my liking, but it get’s the job done. Not sure if they are in a hurry to bring updates to it, but i would love to see what they change or are able to. As for Xbox as is the story of the platform, it’s so close yet so far away. Most of the far away is them getting in the way of what’s close if that makes sense. Like why do they use so much Ad’s, they have the money. I don’t need to know on my Home Screen that the Last of us is on HBO. Come MS, then as i mentioned on here earlier, please fix up the Achievements tab, there is a lot of things on there that seems like duplicates. Trim it down, take the Apple method which is to keep bloat to a minimum. If they did that, added HDR, and 4K pictures on the achievements tab and improved speed. Xbox has a winning Ui that in my book is the best of the 3 easily. For those that don’t ask for HDR on the Ui i think thats a big miss, for an example. I have my Apple Music logged into both Series X and PS5, the PS5 is HDR and looks nice and clear on my Oled and the Xbox’s is blurry in comparison, i know thats not a Ui thing, but inside the Ui Xbox is 4K mostly and PS5 is 4K HDR. These are just the things i noticed and pay attention to. Again i am spending $2k plus on a Oled tv and another $500 on a console to get the best out of my equipment, not to see blurry images and shotty text. If we are going to be a tech industry that pushes the latest and greatest make it worth our time and money. The whole rumor of 8K on the Pro models is just laughable to me seeing so much 1080P carry over from Xbox. Rant over, sorry friend, this one is a passion topic for me, i am picky at what i look at and read. I want the best, cause not to sound arrogant but i paid for it.

I find it a little weird that a company that makes its primary income from designing and delivering operating systems, is still not able to deliver a well designed one on its consoles.
Mind you, maybe I shouldnt be suprised, windows 11 just gets in my way..
It should at least look pretty, and not using 4k assets for UI seems so backwards now. I'd love to see adds removed, they have no right to be there.
Neither Sony or MS can rest on their laurels here, both systems seem less than optimal for doing what they should, but transformation seems painfully slow...

@NEStalgia I hear the next God of War is going to be a turn based RPG. But it doesn't matter. It'll be a quality game. Everyone will love it! Right? RIGHT?! PLEASE TELL ME THEYLL LOVE IT?

On topic now. My UI is too complicated. I think the guy at Best Buy said it's called Windows. He said you need a Harvard degree to operate it, and sometimes you might have to update a driver or download more RAM.

Like @Green-Bandit, I acknowledge that the UI of Xbox is awesome and has tons of well-organised options and well-presented collections of games. It's much better than Sony and Nintendo's. The problem is not the dashboard or UI but the tiles: adverts, Your Friend Earns More G than You... Most of those tiles are redundant and even annoying and should be completely optional for those that, for some reason, like them. That last row shouldn't be a giant Add More with huge tiles referring to games or friends. The tiles, the tiles are the problem.

@Titntin agreed both PS5 and Series consoles Ui are not ideal, functional yes, but not user friendly. Windows 11 is for work, my company uses it. At home i am an exclusive Apple household and MACOS and iOS run circles around windows 10-11. Xbox is the only MS product i use and actually like. Don’t even let me start on a rant about M processors over intel. Sorry i think this whole post is more of a rant than informative buddy hahaha

@Banjo- I agree man, the titles weren’t good years ago when they went with them and they aged even worse. If they went away from that and things you mentioned, you are looking at way less bloat. Which I think is mainly the issue with it. Titles and bloat, the foundation of the Ui is really solid. Far better than PS5.

@SplooshDmg Funny how every single time I use that game or other popular games as examples nobody acknowledges it. It's utterly bizarre there's any debate at all.

The guy at best buy lied to you. I deal with professionals that only work with fortune 500 windows servers every day and they definitely don't have Harvard degrees. Or middle school diplomas. I'm not certain they can tie their own shoes without googling it.

@NEStalgia Because the game is being injected with action, and action is what potted plants crave. So, your argument is irrelevant. If something goes from turn based to action, that is an improvement, even if you strongly prefered turn based, or just slower combat in general. You're outnumber by a legion of potted plants that will ooohh and aaahh at the flashy particle effects and the ZOMG ULTRA COMBO KAIJU BATTLE! So you can't win.

I can't wait until the next God of War is a first person shooter, and Kratos is like, thousands of years old and it's World War I now, and he's just out there fighting in the trenches of Verdun. It'll be some weird alt history shooter where the God of War leads the allied forces to victory. Everyone is sure to love that, Kratos might even say boy a time or twelve and everyone will lose their minds. The boss battle with Wilhelm II is sure to be epic.

So remove the adverts and show only the installed games and recent ly played cloud games in a horizontal listt.

Job done,

@SplooshDmg The weird thing about all that is.... Flashy action games have been around forever. Everything in arcades were flashy action games in the 80s. There's this bizarre conversation around menu driven gameplay being dated and being updated for the times while flashy action is an older genre than menu based games.

But that whole debate goes beyond that in weird ways. I'm not sure action is even part of it. Tales has always been action. Ys is action. They're still RPGs. The celebration isn't about adding action it's about removing the RPG. Imagine if Starfield was basically Guardians of the Galaxy and elder scrolls/fallout fans were going ape over how great a change that is? It's preposterous. I truly don't get the aggressive attempt to deflect any criticism about changing the entire genre of a series. I literally just can't comprehend the head space involved in that thought process.

Your example is almost the same example I've used several times except I've made kratos a football player lol. Nobody touches it then keeps repeating the refrain.

I keep comparing it to the toxic Pokemon fandom but I'm starting to think the Pokemon people are more clear headed.

The ads are the problem . The ui would look just fine without them .

@NEStalgia Well that's sort of my point. Hack n slash action is basically it's own sub-genre. Tales is very much an action RPG, the combat is just nowhere near as deep as say DmC or NG and some actual RPG elements still exist. Another example, Fallout 3 is an RPG, not an FPS. It sorta looks like an FPS, but the game was never designed to behave like one, because it's not one, and people moan that the gunplay is clunky, not snappy enough, etc. When in reality, it's just an RPG that is still self aware that it's an RPG. So that's more my point with action and what it is I think other players are wanting. It's like you said, strip away any semblance of an RPG and they're probably going to be happy about it.

We live in an era where Horizon: Forbidden West is considered an "RPG" by many. Gimme a freaking break. The entire RPG genre partically fell out of DnD. That was the whole flippin point of turned based Japanese RPGs, people! We took our turn and decided what we were going to do, because we're keyword ROLEPLAYING. The key issue for me is really that the games industry has just butchered what the word roleplaying even means now. It's just a quick buzzword to tell the player that you earn utterly redundant skill points and get to plug them in somewhere and then you will pewpew the monsters better. Or that there's maybe four or five NPCs you get to talk to along the way and they might want you to knock out some laundry for them because they're gonna be busy this Thursday, but if you get the stain out of those pants you'll get some bonus XP. My frustration about the rejoice for FFXVI is that it's sending signals to finally just kill AAA JRPGs entirely because they're just "dated" now.

I hope players realise MS aren't ever going to remove the adverts. They could change everything, but the adverts will remain. Relevant ads would certainly improve things somewhat.

An easy fix, allow players to change the tile size on the main dashboard. Tile sizes could be amended by tile or by tile strip.

That way you cover accessibility for those that require larger tiles and those than don't can make them smaller to see more of their themes.

Happy they have read people’s posts and comments about the dashboard and are looking to update it to be better.