The New PSN Store

Sony clearly hasn't hired any UI people yet. The search feature is so bad that I'm still wondering if I'm using it right. Right now all I can do is go to the first letter in a title then scroll through every title (both games and movies) that PSN stocks to find what I'm looking for. If there's a proper search, I can't easily find it. So search is either useless or the UI is broken.

If you're lucky enough to find what you want then be prepared to do a lot more clicking to actually buy something. I'd say that it's at least double the clicks to actually download an item compared to the old store. The one thing I will give it is that the look is better than the old store, but the functionality is much, much worse. One star.

this review: 6 stars

It does indeed suck a giant dick, but the search part works fine since you can actually add additional letters. That is, if the game you want is even in the database. Trying to search for Dark Souls yielded nothing even though the DLC was clearly on the front page. It was also missing from the newest section, that is, if you can even find it. That is, if you can even open the store without having it crash in one of six different ways. Tried again later and then Dark Souls was there but the DLC was not attached. Then I was looking at One Piece, where all the DLC was there, except for the bundle with all of it. And yes, you're right, it takes a million clicks, taking you through all sorts of crazy steps, just to download a demo. Such a big fucking mess. The person who thought it was great was probably the game guy who greenlit the Vita.

Ah, I see now. The whole alphabet list is essentially the search box. Man, that's not intuitive at all.

But it seems to be the way apps are going. Youtube does it, some other thing I've tried to use does it. The autofill is supposed to keep you from having to type everything in by predicting your search based on popular searches and your previous searches, but it's pretty cumbersome to scroll through 26 letters in a line rather than grouped together on a virtual keyboard. The idea is nice but the execution is silly.

@Nodima said:

But it seems to be the way apps are going. Youtube does it, some other thing I've tried to use does it. The autofill is supposed to keep you from having to type everything in by predicting your search based on popular searches and your previous searches, but it's pretty cumbersome to scroll through 26 letters in a line rather than grouped together on a virtual keyboard. The idea is nice but the execution is silly.

The it's pretty cumbersome and a nice idea pretty much sum up the redesign as a whole for me. Whilst it may look pretty it is far less function than the previous iteration.

At least it's just the store. Microsoft usually fucks up the entire UI to make things look prettier. I'm convinced that idiotic games media people and other idiots complain about the UI so that the company can fix it by ruining it. Overall the store is less snappy, a little bit confusing, and much more ad friendly. Basically I think Sony hired a microsoft UI designer to rebuild the PS store.

IDK. I popped into it and had no problems finding anything. A few things were played out in a weird way, but it's far from the travesty being talking about here in my experience.

At least I can yell at my Xbox instead of typing with my game pad. God I hate that scrolling alphabet BS...

@Enigma777 said:

At least I can yell at my Xbox instead of typing with my game pad. God I hate that scrolling alphabet BS...

and some of the time it even listens! (really hope they put the processors back in the kinect unit for kinect 2, or the new 360 gives it it's own dedicated processor or...something...)

ok here's the big question: better or worst than Xbox dashboard?

My favorite UI is the "Red Screen of Death" for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

@Wikitoups: While I think it's worse than the old PSN store, it's still easier than trying to navigate the current Xbox dashboard to buy anything. I gave up on doing that a long time ago and pretty much just buy everything off xbox.com now.

It's not so bad, takes some time getting used to but I just wish they would just make an XMB overhaul.

@Enigma777: (I have to say your avatar is great)

On topic though,@Eclectic: You're right, you're not using it right. Instead of just searching for the first letter..be crazy, select the second, maybe third..if you do that, it actually works pretty well...

Still better than the 360's UI.

Take some time to get used to it. I think it's kinda cool

@Enigma777 said:

@demonknightinuyasha: And a better mic/noise cancellation so I don't have to constantly yell at my TV like an idiot. Every time I do it my dog looks up and just gives me this pitying look...

I do love that it seems that the universal tone to take with kinect when it's not recognizing you is to talk to it like a dog that isn't listening XD

It needs some backend work, and they need to decide whether demos need a check out or not (as some do and some don't), however the interface itself still focuses on the primary thing a game console should be about, games, and therefore I feel it's superior to the current 360 interface.

(But it REALLY needs some backend work. If you're going to base it off HTML5, you need to get your bandwith together to make it load properly all the time. I'll have times where it's instantaneous through multiple pages, and then sometimes where images take a long while to load.)

It was super slow for me, and there was a lot of lag scrolling through lists.

I like it quite a bit, hasn't given me any issues(yet).

Only issues I have is the weird delay booting up the store

I don't get why people complain so much about the new search feature. For once it actually works. I want the new Walking Dead episode, I just type walk and boom, there it is. Before I would get over 1000 results(!) and none of them was what I actually was looking for. That isn't a problem anymore.

I have only redeemed the AC3 code so I don't really know much about it. Looks nice and that code redeem option is at a very easy place... I have to check it out more, even thought I don't download much from there.