Please indulge this rant and excuse my bad photos as I vent my frustrations about UI...
Why can't console manufacturers help themselves? Why are "new and improved" interfaces always worse than the one before it. Today Xbox started rolling out the new home screen for Xbox consoles and I hate everything about it. They have combined what used to be a handful of separated horizontal screen pages into one giant vertical page. It is a hideous, clustered mess of ads for garbage I don't want to engage with burying the few things I do want to engage with and has removed virtually all customization options of the previous iteration.
Here's the first thing you see when you turn on the console. Looks pretty similar to the old one. They've added a XMB-style little menu at the top to get to stuff like the dedicated Game Pass and store pages, which is a fine addition. But then they've shrunk down all your app tiles, but not the ads, in favor of this big empty space on the top half of the screen, to show off custom backgrounds, I guess.
Scroll down to the next screen, and it's immediately an ad for Game Pass. They've just added the same section that is on the dedicated Game Pass page to the home screen. Completely redundant. Previously these screens would be fully customizable. You could add apps, groups of apps, or remove apps as you saw fit, and order them any way you liked. As far as I can tell, there's no more ordering or removing. Your stuck with what Xbox wants you to see.
On the next page you do get two of the custom groups you have set up, but as far as I can tell, you only get two. I used to have five or six, so now if I want to see all the stuff I used to have, I need to go into my full list of games and apps in the Games and Apps menu. The entire point of grouping this stuff onto a home page is to avoid doing that for quick access of the stuff I use the most. And as a reminder, I now have to scroll past the previous screen of Game Pass ads to get to them.
Scrolling down to the next page we have this Friends & Community app that I've never used once in my life as well as more Game Pass ads.
The next page is more ads. This time for media apps and Game Pass.
Followed by a second page of ads that are once again for Game Pass and media apps for some ungodly reason.
More ads for Game Pass. Again, there's an entirely separate, dedicated page for Game Pass that shows all the exact same stuff. Why is any of this needed on the home screen?
Ads for stuff in the Xbox Store.
And finally, some ad called "Personalize Your Play" for games I don't own. Apparently, "personalize" just means "Buy some shit", which is hilarious considering they just took out any and all options to personalize this new home screen.
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