Back in the good old days, game consoles didn't really need their own on-screen interface. You
simply put in the cartridge, turned the thing on, and played the game. But as our systems have expanded to handle everything from downloadable games to Netflix streaming, they've needed increasingly complex interfaces to help users manage all those different tasks. Microsoft's latest Xbox 360 dashboard update launches on Tuesday, and I've been using it as part of a beta program for a few months now. Previous changes to the Xbox interface have been pretty radical, but this is a more incremental update. Still, it's a welcome one.
"I think...with the holiday release last year we went more toward the Windows 8 look and feel," Xbox group client manager Kevin Gammill told Ars. "What you see with the release this year is a further refinement on that, primarily driven by what we found from research and what our users were actually doing."
Those refinements come from what Gammill calls "both qualitative and quantitative user research at a microscopic level." The process started earlier this year, long before the beta launched for hundreds of thousands of Xbox users, Gammill said. Microsoft conducted mock-up testing at its Redmond campus and detailed in-home testing among targeted users in the US and internationally. Gammill and his team also pay attention to aggregate usage data from both beta testers and users of last year's dashboard update, as well as general complaints and suggestions on message boards.
All of these data streams have led to some subtle but important refinements to the Dashboard this time around. The Games tab is now listed further to the left, for instance, meaning it takes only two clicks of the shoulder button to get there from the home screen, rather than four. People have been suggesting this change on message boards for a while, Gammill said, but the decision came "primarily because of user data. We track everything, we have everything instrumented, and [the Games tab] is where people were going. Why make our users go through a number of twists when a majority of them go straight to games?"
This year's update also packs more of those Windows 8-style boxes into each tab, another decision that was made after looking at the data. "We found through some of our instrumentation data that a majority of users are running HD" instead of SD, Gammill said. "In the past, we weren't exactly optimized for SD, but we had to straddle the HD/SD fence. As the technology has gone on, and more users have gone to an HD system, we've taken more advantage of that."
Most of the other interface changes in this year's update are about increasing visibility and accessibility for useful but less-obvious features. For instance, each tab now has a large box in the lower left corner allowing users to search just within that area. Users could do this previously by tapping the Y button (there's even a small, on-screen tooltip explaining this), but Gammill said his team "found through research that [the feature] wasn't very discoverable."
The new interface also lets users "pin" their favorite apps to an area that can be accessed directly from the home screen, eliminating the need to scroll through a bunch of tabs to seek them out each time. Also easier to locate are personalized recommendations for new games and videos you might enjoy. They are populated automatically on the right side of their tabs, rather than being buried deep in sub-menus.
Speaking of recommendations, the majority of each tab's real estate is still taken up by a rotating selection of "featured" content, usually highlighting a big-name new release or special deal. It makes the entire Dashboard feel a bit like a giant automated billboard. Gammill said this featured content is separate from the labeled video ads, and that the selections are dictated by clickthrough rates, not marketing dollars. "We have a whole programming team whose job it is to kind of program that [featured] content... Audience engagement is the most important thing they pay attention to. They really focused on bringing relevant content to users."
Gammill said he sees a future where this kind of featured content is guided automatically by user tracking to get even more targeted. "You can imagine a time not too far away where we learn more and more about who you are as you consume entertainment on the Xbox, and those promotional contents being more appropriate for who you are… [If] they know I'm a hardcore gamer [I'll see] something about Halo 4 on the home page, and my wife who logs in who's not a hardcore gamer but actually likes sci-fi movies, that promotional content may be something about Prometheus or something like that."
The Xbox 360 interface has come a long way since the days of the fondly remembered "blades" layout of the system's launch, but Gammill sees the interface's design evolution as a natural path toward the current, Windows 8-style interface.
"You can't make everybody happy all the time, but we really had to move away from the blades, just to be more relevant. To truly position the Xbox as all of entertainment we had to move away from blades and toward a more modern look and feel... We're on the precipice of something even greater. As Windows 8 launches and Windows Phone starts to gather momentum, I think having a common user experience paradigm will benefit our users tremendously."
SOURCE:ARSTECHNICA
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