Hacker News Reader

Comment by babypuncher | Hacker News Reader

I find it fascinating to learn that they tried. It looks like they really did, but it was a futile effort. What they needed to do was cut out a lot of the unnecessary crap.

The beginning of the end was the release of the "New Xbox Experience" in 2008, which introduced a new rich and very cumbersome UI that was way heavier on resources, more confusing to navigate, and dedicated more real estate to ads and "sponsored content".

If Microsoft cared about speed and usability, they should have reversed course. Kill NXE, restore the original snappy Blades UI, and backport the one useful NXE feature (the ability to install disc games to the HDD). Nobody's going to care about 3D avatars if they make your game machine take three times longer to boot.

View on HN

I was shocked when, very late in that console cycle, I, a PS3 owner, got ahold of a cheap, used 360.

Holy shit, the menu was so bad. Ads and other shit everywhere. Cluttered and inconsistent such that it was tricky to find anything—I still have one, and still play games on it sometimes, as recently as last week, but even today don't feel like I have a good mental model for the menu layout and functions, everything just feels randomly strewn about, that even goes for the in-game pop-up system menu.

And yes, it's noticeably laggy.

I've not been happy with the direction of the PS4 and PS5 menus, but despite a ton of shitting-up compared with the sublimely-snappy-and-simple PS3 menu, they're still not that bad—and at least they have the horsepower to run the webshit Playstation Store without constantly running out of memory and refreshing, or crashing, or taking comically long to load a page. You'd think they'd prioritize a great store experience to get you to spend more money, but on the PS3, you'd be wrong. But anyway, point is the 360 menu is so bad that years of making Playstation menus worse hasn't been enough to catch up with its awfulness.

Haven't seen the XBone menu yet. Hope it's better.

One thing to note is that if you're using a 360 now, the most recent update is not actually the NXE. They updated the 360 dash again to make it look like the then-current Xbone dash.

For reference:

- Blades dash has four or five "blades" that you can flip between. Each blade has it's own UI and can open up into submenus.

- NXE dash has a vertical list of horizontal menus, sort of like XMB flipped on its side. Or the Blades dash flipped on its side and with everything on one row each. This design was tweaked several times, most notably when the Kinect launched.

- Grid dash has a grid of icons, vaguely like the Wii Menu, except you can't reorganize anything on it and everything is ads.

I got my 360 the day before the NXE launched, so I didn't notice a performance regression with NXE. But using the grid dash today makes the console feel incredibly sluggish.

Ah, I probably am looking at the grid one these days, then. I've definitely got it connected to the 'net, and updated, since the single most important exclusive game on it is digital-only (the Perfect Dark HD re-release—the version that's just the original game with better textures, 720p resolution, and a modern control scheme)

So the weird, incoherent mess of options on each screen, sized and placed seemingly at random, with ads often far more prominent than any of the stuff you might actually want to do on that screen, is actually an XBone-ism? Boo, I hoped that if I ever got around to having one of those it'd be nicer :-(

I do remember it updating & changing at some point, and that it still sucked before that. I got it after the blade menu, though. I think it had that at first, but lost it as soon as it updated after plugging it in, so I never really used it. NXE's what I probably used the first times I actually played anything on it.

Googles

Oh my god, yes, I do remember NXE. Hahahaha, wow, I'd forgotten that. How awful. I partially retract my complaints about the current menus.

I had the reverse experience. I owned an Xbox 360 and recently picked up a PS3. The PS3 menu is unbelievably snappy by comparison. It’s really hard to go back now, but the Xbox 360 dashboard had always seemed fast enough at the time.

Agreed - 14 year old me was very disappointed with NXE.

The new tiles were a good lesson in how any vacuum in a UX will be filled with ads given enough time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com