XBox 360: The interface needs help

December 22, 2007

Before I start talking about the XBox 360’s features specifically, I want to talk about the interface itself — seen here in a click-to-enlarge screenshot. The XBox 360 and the Wii are the first video game systems I’ve owned that have a kind of operating system you’re expected to interact with. The PS2 had one, (kinda) which let you set the clock or manage your memory cards. But both the Wii and the XBox have other applications and online storefronts. So the console interface itself does a lot more work than you expect.

XBox 360 screenshot from Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite.

The Wii’s interface is clean and uncluttered. Some important functionality, like adding the addresses of your other Wii friends, is a little buried and hard to find — but for the most part it’s responsive and not difficult to get around in at all. The primary navigation metaphor for the Wii is the “channel,” and the selection screens are rows of tiny television screens showing you what you can expect to see when you select the channel. I like the Wii interface. It feels like it was designed by a small dedicated team of user interface professionals, probably with the aid of nice coffee and an office with a lot of atmosphere.

The XBox 360 interface is another matter entirely. It’s rife with confusing terminology, mixed metaphors, foolishly complicated processes to accomplish tasks mastered by the Mac OS circa 1984. Far from being a UI labor of love, this interface feels like it was designed by a small army of marketing middle-manager rejects from Moe’s Southwestern Grill directing a beleaguered team of user interface professionals who sit in their grey cubicles and dream dreamy dreams of nice coffee and an office with a lot of atmosphere.

Much more after the jump:

The 360 interface (called a “dashboard”) is made up of several screens, each with a web-pagish feel to them. Each screen is colored differently (you can change the color scheme yourself, but that’s another post) and accessed by selecting vertical tab-like devices Microsoft insists are called a “blades.” I’ve never known a dashboard to have blades, although who knows what Microsoft middle-managers do in their spare time.

The blades are labeled “marketplace,” “xbox live,” “games,” “media,” and “system.” That seems straightforward enough, but marketplace-ish activity actually happens on every screen except the “system” screen, and “Xbox Live” — the online gaming capabilities of the system — pretty much permeate everything. And you can launch whatever is in the DVD drive on every page except marketplace (makes sense) and system (which doesn’t).

As mentioned earlier, a “blade” is a mixed (not to mention uncomfortable) metaphor for navigating dashboard screens, and I wondered what the rational for this word choice was. Real life blades can occasionally have writing on them, but it’s usually just a brand name. You don’t usually pull out your chef’s knife to twiddle a setting or check the thermostat. After several days of pondering and, finally, one especially hot bath it occurred to me they might mean “blade” like a Swiss Army Knife blade. That metaphor seems to fit — like the Swiss Army Knife, these tools are not particularly useful, but they do in a pinch.

Because of their very narrow capabilities but mostly non-specific labels, I find myself flipping back and forth between blades trying to find what I’m looking for. Especially since some tasks require you to use more than one blade. There’s nothing like a standard operating system here — you can’t move, delete, and launch files from the same screen. Clearing your hard drive of files you no longer want, for example, requires that you go to the “media” blade or the “game” blade (and then the appropriate sub-menu) to play the files. Once you’ve identified what you want to delete, you have to go to the “system” blade (and a further sub-menu) to delete the files. But how often will you do this wholesale cleanup? At least once, if you purchased the system with the 20-gig hard drive. The XBox 360 comes loaded with ten gigs of promotional materials and demo games.

Which brings us to the advertising portion of the XBox 360 dashboard. With the exception of the “System” blade, all the other blades initially dedicate anywhere from a third to two-thirds of the remaining available space to advertising. Right-side advertising is generally replaced by sub-menus once you’ve selected a menu item, but still — it’s a little bit overkill. At the moment the advertising appears to be appropriately target to games and gamers, although I can’t think of any reason why this space wouldn’t be used to assault me with ads for movies or sugared cereal or sugar cereal based on movies based on video games. It is surely only a matter of time.

Still to come: the a video store which behaves like iTunes designed by Cenobites.

Posted in Entertainment