Sony Showcases the PS5 UI

Personally, this is often one of the most interesting bits about a new console, partially because the concept of a "UI" in general was so novel to me as far back as playing CDs on the original PSX but has more and more really come to define what a person's experience with a console is like.

My first thought: there's a lot of XBox in this! Sony seems to have pulled back from their more distinctive, blue and white aesthetic in favor of XBox's more muted, soft look. I wonder why both companies are favoring this look? Personally, I find it a little bland.

Anyway, some pretty interesting stuff in here that could have much broader ramifications than we can really know at this moment...or just kind of fall by the wayside as first party implementations of third party functions have tended to in the past. The most interesting one for me was the pairing of an estimated time remaining for given achievements/"activities" in a game as well as developer-curated screenshot/video guides for PS+ users. The latter seems like it could be a real game changer, but I feel like XBox marketed similar things in the run-up to the Series X and I never hear owners of that console talk about how they never use Polygon guides or watch Youtube videos anymore.

I love seeing new UI, it's one of my favourite things about new console launches.

I'll be honest, the UI (UX?) reveals don't catch my eye at all. I basically go in and play my games at this point, without too much party chat or checking achievements.

With that being said, all this stuff looks clean and user-friendly so cool.

@csl316: Isn't good UI the kind you never even notice?

@ghost_cat: Yes. But I also don't use many features in the consoles. I just do my initial setup when I buy it, then start my games for 5 to 10 years.

Cannot wait to report trolls. I love that recording feature so much.

Who would have predicted that in 2020 Sony would be showing off the Xbox “snap” feature for its upcoming console

Seems fine. The thing I want with any UI, besides it being functional, is customization. Give me folders. Let me set when, where, and how big notifications pop up. That sort of stuff.

All the game help stuff seems neat, but I can't imagine it being fully utilized by many developers post launch. Making games is already hard enough on a lot of the people making them, probably don't need to task them with creating guides on top of everything else.

The card feature seems a bit disorganized, but maybe it'll make more sense when you're using the UI yourself. Not sure about that. The game specific objectives/help thing seems interesting, but I can't imagine that will catch on with many games down the road. It kinda reminded me of the PS4's SharePlay, another feature that Sony made a pretty big deal of that never caught on.

The most exciting thing to me would be the new social features., like being able to picture-in-picture a friend's gameplay and sharing screenshots to parties. That's pretty rad to see on a console.

The one thing that stood out to me was the picture in picture "Watch a friend's game while you play your own" thing. Much like a lot of novel console features it's a toy that will likely get little to no use outside of a few cases, but there's something fun about it. I imagine it could be a fun way to play a single player game together with a friend, for example.

Sony's focus on minimalism has actually resulted in really chaotic organization that has given me a headache since the PS3. Ramrodding all these features that definitely have inherently different values into one long bar might make it look clean when you boot it up, but scrolling along that bar to find the one thing you want is tedious and inefficient. Thank god they're at least separating the media apps into a separate tab. Still, scrolling through all your recently played games just to get to an organized list of the games is bad. I just want "my library" to be at the top of any dashboard. "Explore" is just an ad as far as I'm concerned, and it shouldn't take precedent on a list of the things I can do.

Its all seems very straigh forward, but Ill have to use it 'first hand' to see if it feels snappy or intuitive to what I woudl be doing at any given moment.

• The voice dictation sounds nice.
• The cards system that shows where you left off on a game, or even granular to a level or missing a pickup, seems neat. (Might get annoying...we will have to see.)
• The store I would assume load in faster since it integrated.
• I will assume, much like teh PS4 options for desktop look and customization will still be in there.

Yeah, as I said above ist all seems logical. I will alos assume the UI will look frin at 1080p too, they speak in tersm of 4K but I think they are just assuring people it will look sharp and not stretched on the newest TVs.

I suppose the only ting I MIGHT want is to maybe have teh ability for a game not to make cards? Its nice that they system is clear about making paths to get quickly back to things...but I suppose an option to shut off card from showing up might be useful.

@bearhardt: This was also pretty interesting to me considering this was touted as one of Stadia's big, cloud-powered features...but here's this physical console doing exactly that. I wonder how restrictive that feature will end up being - one utility I could see for that feature is a game like Apex allowing matchmade parties to sync their video feeds to further enhance non-vocal communication, though I suppose depending on your screen size two PiP boxes would be a detriment to the experience overall.

I really don't game with friends that often but my sister has been getting more and more into it and I could see enjoying that feature in a party chat to show each other new games we've bought or our favorite parts of something. I do have one friend that plays about as much MLB The Show as I do and it could be fun to just have that in a small box elsewhere on the screen to comment on card pulls or fun online matches.

My group of friends use Shareplay on the PS4 a ton, this new ability to stream into a group seems to be soooooo great for us. love the picture-in-picture addition.

Upon some thinking I’ve come up with my big personal selfish PS5 UX wish: Doing away with the ugly and obtrusive PS3 style system-wide save interface. It’s a nitpick I know but it’s my nit to pick.

Just go an email from Sony Store

The interesting parts was this, to me at least

What is changing?

The following changes will come into effect online from 21 – 26 October, and on mobile on 28 October:

• You will no longer be able to buy:

o PlayStation®3 games and add-ons
o PSP™ (PlayStation®Portable) games and add-ons
o PlayStation®Vita games and add-ons
o Apps
o Themes
o Avatars

I hope the above means they are getting ride of the old THEME & AVATRA system. I did liked the custoizablity of the system; However, I hated the CONTENT that was being sold. Too many of the themes, not made by game developers, were shitty wallpapers made by terrible artists or plain ol thieves. Aside from the develops the only good art was from a few comic book brands or comic artsis like Ilya Kuvshinov. The rest was embarrassing garbage nobody should have bought; nor had the ability to buy if I had my way.

So, if the old apps , themes and avarats are going away that is GOOD. Because that means not even PSP, Vita, PS3 and PS 4 users cannot buy those terrible themes and avatars anymore. Let's all stop giving money to those no talent hacks.

There's also that embarrassing glitch sometimes when you go to the game deals page but because all those items get PS+ deals and appear to be categorized as games, the page is just absolutely flowing with bullshit.