The Xbox One UI is a living, breathing thing, one that Microsoft continues to tweak and change in response to user feedback and criticism. And while some may criticize Microsoft for still not quite getting the UI right with the Xbox One – certainly, they have not yet managed to hit the simplicity that Xbox 360’s Blades UI provided all the way back in 2005 – one still has to give Microsoft credit for always staying on top of what their users want.
Mike Ybarra, Director of Programming at Xbox, shared some of the changes he wants to make to the Xbox One UI with Game Informer recently. And while you would think that after two years of persistent tweaking, the guys at Xbox would be out of any major changes left to make, it seems that they still have some big ideas in gestation.
“We have our list of areas,” Ybarra said. “Like Collection. I’d love to redesign Collection because since people are buying more digital now, the Collection should be something people can go to and be like, ‘Wow, I can see my whole library of games. I see everything and it’s really easy to get to!’ Today, it isn’t. So, I want to go fix Collection. There are some social elements we want to improve. We’ve always listened to what the fans are saying. One thing about the gaming industry is you have very passionate fans about what they want, so everybody understands what our fans want and we’re prioritizing those. I would expect us to continue to invest both in the Xbox app design and the console-based OS design to do more things like New Xbox Experience and really kind of bring them what they want through big catalyst changes and smaller changes.”
A lot of those changes sound like they would be significantly for the better- and it is good to see that Microsoft continue to take user feedback into account as they sit down to plan these changes and tweaks as well.