Jason Chen on why the New Xbox Experience won't sell Xboxes

Posted by Jason Chen on Sun 9 Nov 2008

Jason Chen, editor of Gizmodo, says...

The complete user interface overhaul of the Xbox 360 is almost upon us. Come late November, every single Xbox user will have their familiar blade interface - oft touted as a smart design choice because it mirrored the “inhaling” shape of the console itself - changed to an entirely different navigational structure. A structure, in our
opinion, that seems to be a lot less structured and a lot more free-form. Is it good? Is it bad? Does it even matter?

First off, a quick recap on the new features. The New Xbox Experience (or NXE) makes you cycle through menus by using a horizontal and vertical scrolling scheme. Instead of individual list items being, you know, items on a list, they’re big, squareish icons that you can easily identify at a glance. The problem with this is that you can
only see a few entries at once, forcing you to actually scroll quite a ways to find the item you want.

Then there’s cool stuff like Avatars (think Nintendo’s Miis, but with fewer customization options and slightly more teen-like), multiplayer parties, new themes and hard drive game installations. Don’t forget built-in Netflix support if your country’s lucky enough to be on Netflix’s roster (many of the Xbox territories are not).

So should you update? Well, you have no choice. Every console needs to download the NXE as a mandatory update when it’s released. If you really MUST have your old blades, you can hit the Xbox guide button from any screen and pop up a blade-like menu where you can access just about everything you could before.

But what’s the upside to Microsoft? Why would they, three years into a console’s lifecycle, abandon their original design and go with something completely different? We see two reasons.

The first is the fact that this update allows Microsoft to inject changes to the UI whenever they want instead of having to wait for Spring or Fall updates. This is very vital to Microsoft if they want to be agile and have the ability to change, say, a section on your interface to pimp out Halo 4 in a timely manner.

Which leads us to the second reason: ads. Ads are no longer confined to square blocks of real estate on the side of menu items; they ARE the menu items. To get to your friends list, or your achievement list, or to even load up a game, you’ll have to scroll past Microsoft’s featured items, which is basically a way to show off their latest games, or news about their latest games, or a DLC related to their latest games.

Which brings us to our main point: why the NXE won’t sell consoles. Ask yourself this: did you buy the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360 or the Wii because of their interface? Because of their ability to play games off a hard drive? Because you could make a virtual character that kinda looked like you? OR, did you buy them because you wanted to play a few particular games on it?