The Xbox One is ROUGH

I finally bought an Xbox One after having owned my PS4 since launch day in 2013. I pretty much assumed the consoles would be roughly the same in user experience but MAN was I wrong.

The UI is sluggish, I have to disconnect from the internet in order to install games from a disk (Destiny was stuck at 75% for 6 hours), the store is impossible to find anything, it takes forever to check your friends list/ achievements, and I cant't tell if games are downloading with the system powered down (which it is supposed to do).

Is there something wrong with my specific console, or is this the general experience on the Xbox One? Is Microsoft doing anything to address these issues?

These are just my initial impressions of the console, since I have only had it for about two days, but so far the Xbox One feels really rough compared to the PS4.

Sounds about right.

Maybe Windows 10 will save us?

You don't need to go offline to install from a disk, it only happens when the disk is useless because the current patch is bigger than the entire game. It happened to me for Borderland The Pre Sequel, but that's the only game that did this, all my other games have been installed from the disk directly.

I also have a PS4 and, for me, the playstation store is worth (can't find anything, slow, etc.) so I guess that just depends of what you're used to.

Concerning the achievements and your friends list I think it's on par, a bit worth for the achievements on Xbox One but I hope it will be better with the new UI in November.

So I'd say that there's nothing wrong with your Xbox One.

I find the UI itself fine and havent had issues with downloading stuff but yeah, the store is a total mess, hopefully the re-designed Win10 based thing will be better

The store has a search button, you can just type in what you want and it filters everything by media type. Also you don't have to go offline to install games from the disc.

I had both consoles and really saw no difference in performance of the OS. PS4 was really no faster than the Xbox, it's just that your used to the PS4 interface.

I can't make sense of any console's interface. Only the PC's interface makes sense to me ;)

@armaan8014: My PC crashed while upgrading to Win 8.1 and I lost all of my Steam saves...haven't played too many PC games since then. :(

From my experience with the PS4 store and dashboard, the XB1 would have to be REALLY messed up to be that much worse. I swear sometimes I KNOW a game is out and it's still an entire process to find it on the PSN store.

@asurastrike: Damn. Losing a save sucks. Losing all your saves would be pretty bad :( My condolences

@armaan8014: Over 60 hours in Dark Souls lost...never going to finish that game. Luckily I watched Vinny beat it so it's all good.

@humanity said:

The PSN really needs better search functionality.

I've really have had no problems with the store.
Like mentioned above, just use the search function, or go "games" and select "all games" and you'll see every title in order by release date.
MS is aware that it can be a little slow which is why they are focusing on the new GUI.

Yeah, the user experience with the Xbone is pretty rough. Sluggish and I don't really like the way everything (especially friends and achievements) is split into "apps". I especially can't stand the app for managing screenshots and clips.

I much prefer the PS4's user experience, it's not perfect (finding something specific on the PSN store certainly takes longer than I would like), but it's a lot better and snappier on the whole.

Not to mention how drastically different (and arguably better) the US PSN store is from the EU one. When The Swindle came out it took me a good couple of minutes to find it and I had to eventually go on my computer and search through the PSN store there to confirm it. That game also had a bigger discount on the US store than the EU store, 15% vs 20% but hey..

They've slowly been improving it but honestly the real fix for their UI issues will be the dashboard update coming in November.

The best description I can give is it basically looks like a combination of the XMB charms and the current Xbox app (Windows 10).

Very intuitive and A LOT faster. And all the voice crap still works too for those weird people.

The Verge has a decent write up on it with screenshots and video.

No issues with installing and I've installed a lot of games. But yes the UI is a tad slow (but so can the PS4's). The Windows 10 revamp does look good tho.

Xbone's interface is designed for voice commands with Kinect. With no Kinect it is kind of sluggish but still better than the PS4 UI, which I hate. At least Xbox makes some use of screen real estate, unlike that stupid ribbon.

PS4 interface is miles better than PS3, and I find it moves a lot faster too. As far as the Xbone, It bothers me how it's set up. Especially since I don't really watch TV.

My PC refused to upgrade to 8.1 properly so I just said fuck it and did a clean install and wiped everything. Thankfully though most of my PC games are steam games so I lost no progress thanks to Steam Cloud save.

Yeah, the UI isn't great. Probably the biggest knock on the console, honestly. They went with the Windows 8-style tile interface for reasons I'll never understand. Weirdly, people dislike it as much on the Xbox One as they did on PC. The tile system should have never been anything other than a mobile/tablet UI. On the Xbox One, it gets a bit easier over time once you figure out where everything is, but there's generally a layer or two of bullshit that doesn't need to be between where you are and where you want to go.

I will say that the Kinect has been incredibly useful to just say "xbox, go to ____" and obviate the UI shortcomings. The market basically flipped the bird to the Kinect, and I get that, but in doing so, they basically demanded a worse user experience. The flaws of the UI are substantially exacerbated if you're trying to get to everything with a controller. Those who opted for the Kinect had it pay dividends here.

The revamped interface drops pretty soon to hopefully make this a non-issue. It looks pretty slick and quick from what I've seen of it so far, so here's hoping it comes through. The UI is about the last real complaint I have with the console, so if they can get it sorted out, I'll be on cloud nine.

The Store is awful to navigate but otherwise I've had no issues at all navigating the Xbox One UI.

It's not great but I don't have any complaints. No console maker seems to have gotten it totally right yet.

It can definitely be slow with some actions, but all indications are the November update speeds things up significantly.

Both need a lot of work. The good news is, after all the work they did on the 360, I'm fairly confident the Xbox One will get the revisions it needs.

Ultimately none of this shit really matters to me though, because I don't buy these systems to stroll around their menus.

Edited for sake of posting before having had my morning coffee.

I've never seen the EU shop; I assumed there wasn't a difference between the NA and EU storefronts in terms of UI.

@hatking: the one nice thing they've done with achievements is make (most) of them have nice art that you can set as your background. Some of it is really gorgeous, like beautiful hi-res images from the Magic The Gathering game. I love being able to easily set Magic card art (which is gorgeous) as my wallpaper, and the Halo the Master Chief Collection stuff is great as well. It is just a cool implementation and I find myself changing my wallpaper frequently.

Why do anything from the Xbox One Store menu? If you have a phone use the Smartglass app. Fuck that thing is a lifesaver and a 100 times easier to navigate and search on.

The Xbox One UI is a hot mess. I often wonder what it would be like if MS stuck to their guns for their original vision of the Xbox One. Maybe it would work a lot better. It's painfully obvious they didn't intend for you to navigate their menus with a controller, that's for damn sure.

Designing the original Xbox One interface with Kinect-integration-as-standard made the overall UI experience much more user-unfriendly than it should have been.

It is somewhat hard to understand how MS got it so hugely wrong on that front but at least they are pointing in the right direction now with the new UI coming in Nov.

I thought this was going to be about how you dropped an X Box 1 down some stairs or something similar. I am disappoint.

Yes! I was actually really excited about that update. I am a little disappointed that so many designers opt out of putting good art in there. Huge missed opportunity for Witcher 3 which just put icons in there. Shadow of Mordor had some great fantasy art in there though!

@oldirtybearon: The UI is nearly identical, there are just a lot less categories and organization. It seems a lot more barebones than the US counterpart.

The dashboard UI is a goddamn hellscape. It's terrible. I hope that big update in the fall revamps everything.

I prefer the logic of the Xbox One UI over the PS4, but you're right in that it's sluggish and buggy as hell.

Yep, the Xbox One UI is pretty bad, especially if you started out with a PS4 and waited to get an Xbox One once the Kinect was removed. The PS4 UI is much better, even with all the patching Microsoft has done. I'm hoping the next dashboard is better.

I have hopes for the update this fall, but yes the current UI is seriously awful. I used to complain about how slow the 360 dashboard became after all the crappy kinect implementation - but the Xbone took it to a new level.

The smartglass app works really well with it though. Surprisingly a cool feature, and worth using as a remote for video apps.

What I'm hearing is bring back the blades. :p

I've been wanting to rant for a while about how the Xbox One is the worst console I've ever owned. For starters, the UI is extremely sluggish. Trying to pull up achievements or friends can take upwards of 10 seconds and I have 100mb internet. The download speeds are laughable. I thought I'd play the new PGA Tour with my brother and started downloading it at 6pm over Ethernet. It finished at 2am. My controller constantly stops working when bringing the console out of low power state. I can tell the UI isn't frozen because the tiles are updating. The only way I've found to correct this issue by doing a hard reset or just unplugging the console. I also used to get an error saying my account couldn't sign after coming out of standby mode, but deleting and re-adding the account seemed to fix that. Pile on top of that the MCC, in which online campaign co-op is still unplayable in 3 due to lag for whoever isn't hosting, and you get the worst console experience I've had to date. If it wasn't for Rockband 4 and all my DLC being on the Xbox, I would have sold that thing for $200 as fast as I could.

I really hope that fucking dashboard update fixes a lot of things.

The xbox one is not very popular over here in Europe, compared to the ps4 anyway, so I guess that's their reason for caring less. Not a valid excuse, but hey it's MS.

Not to be a pessimist but every time Microsoft has made a Dash Board update in the past hasn't it made the console feel and the UI worse. I'm skeptical that this latest update will be a magic bullet considering how their efforts on 360 have gone.

Then again this is the same company that made the Edge browser and Windows 10 recently so there is that.

I'm in the same boat, just got a Xbox One after having a PS4 for a while. While the PS4 isn't perfect, the Xbox One interface is pretty terrible by comparison. Seriously, having to go offline to get some games installed? That's ridiculous. I got Sunset Overdrive with my console and it took over 7 hours to install (exactly how long idk, I gave up and went to sleep). I later learned about the offline trick, but that's not something one should have to do. Also, imagine if you couldn't go offline as originally planned.

And yes, navigating friends lists, your app list, the store, and most everything else is slow and not not very user friendly. It doesn't feel like the console is even finished to me. I'm excited about some of the games coming up, but the console itself is a mess.

Both consoles have pretty poor UI but at least you navigate through shit faster on PS4.

@alexw00d: I was talking about the PS4 store.

The Xbox interfaces are way too busy.

You need the Kinect. The current UI is a pain to navigate without it. I'm sure the coming update will improve things hugely.

Oh god so you were. Well, uh. Sony has the majority so they think they don't need to care. Haha.

Really? So the Xbox One OS takes up 138 GB of your hard drive and it's still a piece of shit. It's ridiculous that on top of that they require each game to be installed. So, if you have the 500 GB model, you can only have about six Blu-ray games installed. Requiring an internet connection is pretty ridiculous too. Microsoft is the one competitor I want out of the console industry the most. They barely have any exclusives because they buy them all temporarily instead of making their own. And it's so easy to get banned and lose everything because of bitter players reporting you. Your only option then is contacting the enforcement team on their website, who won't even help you because there's nothing in place to make sure that you're being banned for legitimate reasons. Terrible company.

IT certainly appears like they don't!

I really dislike the Xbox one UI, but to be fair I did get one without the kinect. The performance is a little sluggish in general compared to the PS4. From the menus to the frame rate and when you come out of pause menu in a game. Also the controller is crap compared to the ps4 controller. I really like Killer Instinct and was happy with the purchase. I could not help thinking that it would feel so much better with a controller that has a functional D pad. I should not have to buy a joystick to enjoy the game proper.

That said, I am enjoying the Rare collection and am looking forward to checking out some exclusives. It shall remain a secondary system for single player exclusive games only like my Wii U. Thanks console makers for facilitating the transformation of my entertainment center into a fire hazard.