Opportunity to Suggest Xbox 360 UI Changes

Well it would be excelent if we can stream video from WMP 11 so then the 360 will be a real multimedia center, and of course the others enhanced things are good too

1.) The ability to fast forward or rewind music tracks.

2.) Sort pictures and ability to change the setting for the slideshow, such as: how long it should stay on a picture or how long the transition should be.

3.) How about when you pick a song from a playlist, it will start playing from that song on, instead of just playing that song over and over.

4.) When we highlight the drive, can we have a button assigned for ejecting the disc?

5.) O, and streaming video without a Media Center would be great.

My favorites:

1. Dash displays game disc title

2. When we highlight the drive, can we have a button assigned for ejecting the disc?

3. multi-delete for saves

The multi-delete is especially immportant. I have over 300 saves on oblivion and it takes so long to delete them one by one.

I posted on the linked blog of course, but I figured I’d post here as well, to add to the discussion.

—–

Here’s my #1 main UI gripe, and it’s totally easy to implement:

In the Personal Settings, you have the option to either enable or disable notifications. I usually have them disabled because, like so many other 360 owners, I have a fairly large friends list. If I enable notifications, I get a dozen little grey bubbles every time I try to play a game, letting me know every time someone else comes online.

What I want is to turn this checkbox into two: one to disable notifications when your friends come online and other system messages, another to disable notifications for invites/messages.

In other words, I want to recieve game invites and notifications when someone sends me a message, but I don’t want to bugged by anything else. There’s no way to do this now, but it would be pretty simple to add.

Though it isn’t a UI thing specifically –

The Xbox 360 DVD playback is terrible. I’m sure there are some who don’t actually pay much attention who will argue it’s "fine" but seriously, it’s one of the worst progressive-scan DVD players on the market. And there’s little excuse for it, with the processing power in the box. It scores worse on HQV than even some other sub-$100 stand alone players. There are visible artifacts in all kinds of movies, including some horrible deinterlacing problems. Just as a simple test the Microsofties can run – play the classic Monty Python movie The Meaning of Life. You’ll immediately see horrible sawtooth deinterlacing artifacts right from the start and through the whole picture. In all movies, detail is poor, noise reduction is non-existant, the list goes on and on. I can’t imagine the video experts in the Windows Media group would look at the 360′s DVD playback and have anything even remotely good to say about it.

So my non-UI-related request is for Microsoft to spend a little engineering time improving DVD playback. The deinterlacing stinks, it fails horribly at cadence patterns that are sometimes pretty common (in anime DVDs and some stuff originally intended for PAL markets in particular), and there’s no noise reduction at all. There’s no reason the 360 can’t upscale, and no reason it couldn’t be one of the best consumer DVD playback machines on the market, using a fraction of the 360′s CPU/GPU. It only needs to be made a priority.

1.  Eject button on Dash with Game Name Displayed

2.  Can we get the XBLA Recent Played thing Disabled.  It takes forever when you go to that tab with 20+ arcade games.   Hell the counter in general can be disabled.

3.  When you download something from the marketplace and you click continue it should go right back to where you downloaded it from so if there are other files to download you can more easily.  (Maybe either a back button and a continue button to give user a choice)

4.  With the Vision camera there should be an option to disable it on the dashboard.  I don’t like the ghosty image thing that’s on there now.

5.  Visual notification via a popup when battery is getting low

6.  Echo what was said before.  Friends online/offline message should be seperate from Achievements/Systems Notifications/Download messages.  I’d like to enable/disable them seperately.

AMEN about the DVD playback. Especially since I have to use my one component input to my tv and that is used by my xbox and my DVD player doesnt have HDMI (which I have two imputs for). I dont get why they dont have an HDMI solution for the 360?

One of my gripe about Xbox Live Marketplace is there are no way to preview Gamer Picture / Themes before we purchase it. The only way to preview the Picture / Theme is to go to Xbox.com on your PC.

It would be nice if we can preview the Picture / Theme on the Xbox 360 before proceeding with the purchase.

Off the top of my head:

> On some menus X is used to delete content (with a yes/no confirmation) others it’s a sub item – it should always be X with a confirmation

> Option to turn off slide animations on the guide. When running over some games they are awfully slow.

> When the guide button is depressed the initial option selected is your gamercard – this is pretty much never your destination either it’s the 3 (messages/friends/players) or it’s personal settings (online status) and posibly music (tho I tend to use the remote). Halo got it right with one tap for friends – lets make it at most two taps for 360.

> This is a proper bug – at the moment users with VGA cables have no way of changing between 50hz/60hz modes without swapping cables connecting to another device changing the setting and swapping back – clearly this is wrong. At worse I’d expect a restart.

This is also crippling for backcompat games where you need to drop to the Live downloader to update (i.e. Splinter Cell 3: Chaos Theory).

> Yup show game title & streaming video.

> A dashboard lobby like was available on the original Xbox – differing from private chat in that it is a actual lobby (like a game) and it allows multiple participants. It would be a nice touch if this was backwards compatible with the orignal Xbox lobby (removing it was another step back).

> More dashboard access for backcompat games. Especially those single player only games (we keep being told that emulators are specialised for each game so…).

> Last played game option in live arcade should just play the game when clicked – if I want to see details go to main list.

> Be able to delete games from the "Played Games List" there are a couple I just popped in the drive and never played for more than 10 minutes, and the Arcade Demos. We should be able to delete them.

> Not 360 UI but whatever happened to Xbox Live .net alerts – we were told spring 2006, but nothing? I really hope your not going to restrict this to Vista Live anywhere. It used to be so easy to see when people where popping on when not on the console – it still feels like we haven’t got back to where we were with live on original Xbox (marketplace excepted).

I would love to be able to turn on my 360 from any internet connection and tell it to download any new release free content that is out and then shut down when complete. Or, if that can’t be done, how about being able to schedule downloads for times when I will be home, but not using the 360? Also, how about putting some HDTV test patterns on the marketplace.

One thing would be ability to play divx and wmv files of disc it is mad haveing to run PC to stream video It would save a lot of power being wasted PC And Xbox 360 both on useing a lot of power with price of power in UK has gone up nearly 40 to 50% this year in states it is alot cheaper hear it is getting painfull my bills going up and up think of green house effect you will get there in UK petrol is nearly $10.00 gall

also put screen saver on Xbox360 like fish swimming like on XP which can be switched in when your box is left the dimmer is not great.

I just posted a bunch of gripes I had with the 360 UI on my blog, but who wants to read that?

I want to be able to tweak how fast the menus come in and out.  Right now one thing about the UI is the speed.  It feels like nothing appears when _I_ want it to, it appears when _it_ wants to.  When I flip to a different blade, I just want to be there.  I don’t want to flip and wait for the animation to go, and the content to load, the content should be there when I get there.  Same goes for say, loading up the Live Arcade titles you have;  I just want them there, I _hate_ having the list slowly populate and jump around and stuff.

Since we _can_ listen to music in BC mode, and the remote can play/pause/next/prev, just add that to the blade.  There really _are_ some things that are available in backwards compat mode, so let us use them!

I guess the UI is optimized for TVs too, but I hate the display of content, be it Marketplace items, videos, or whatever.  Let us sort by name or something.  Date downloaded.  And search!  Why is there no search function for the Marketplace?  If I know what I want, I don’t want to search through the crappy menus for it!  Don’t even get me started on that; you guys did a better job on the second version of the 360 Marketplace (are there only two?) by adding the categories all over the place, but it still isn’t ideal!

Anyways, I’d really just like to navigate the menus faster, the delays are annoying.

Nick Spacek

This may have more to do with the game itself, wrather than the UI, but I’m kind of tired of having to select my hard drive over and over again when I’m trying to save or load anything. Especially if you only have one storage device plugged into your machene.

^ See: Enchanted arms, farcry, etc.

This is what I wrote:

———————

1. Guide Button in BC – Ability to use Xbox Guide Button when playing original Xbox backwards compatible (BC) games. For example, you are playing a BC game and you want to check your friends list. So just press the guide button and you can check your friends list and or other features.

2. BC Online – Remain online when playing BC games. It say say ‘[Gamertag here] currently playing Original Xbox Game’ or something like that.

3. Friend Groups – There should be a feature that allows you to add groups to your friends list. For example, "Family" group and it will have the gamertags below it. Then the regular ‘Friends’ group (default). You should be allowed to add as many groups as you like because some people would like to have some for certain games. Just to make it easier for people who have many friends online.

4. Deleting Games/Achievements – I believe this is one of the biggest issues for gamers. I know deleting individual achievements is not possible. But what about deleting a game from your ‘played games’? By deleting a game the achievements from that game will be deleted too. This also helps to make your ‘played games’ list more clean and organized.

5. Marketplace Notifications – I think this would be a nice feature. ‘Marketplace Notifications’ notifies the player of new content in the marketplace. A notification will pop-up on the screen (like Achievement/Friends notifications) telling you theres new content, etc. When it appears, you press the guide button and it will tell you whats new. You will have the option to be notified with the type of content you selected (XBLA, specific games, videos, etc.).

6. Hot News – A marquee headline of some sort can be added to the UI. The headline will only appear when you are online. It will display important news in real-time related to Xbox 360.

7. Video Improvements – When Xbox 360 is connected to Media Center, watching videos doens’t have many options. There should be an option for the video to repeat it self over and over again.

8. Mac Compatible – I know theres a small percentage of Mac users. But it would be cool if Mac users could connect their Macs with Xbox 360 to stream music, videos, and pictures. By the way, I’m not a Mac user. But I will be one soon.

9. Saved Media – Saving media (pictures, music, video, etc.) to the harddrive would be great. I know you can save music already. But you need to format the burned CD into an audio cd. Maybe more options to save would be nice (DVD and data CD).

10. More Customization – Themes and Gamer Pictures aren’t enough. Themes are basically wallpaper. More customization options would be nice. Not sure like what though.

11. Web Browser – A web browser would be fantastic. But not really needed. If it was added, the web browser should be under the Media blade.

12. Game Defaults – In my opinion Game Defaults doesn’t change the settings for any games. This nice feature should have effect on all games.

13. Rep replacement – On the Xbox Live blade, it shows your gamertag at the top. Your gamertag displays your rep and stars. It would be nice if we had the option to remove the Rep and stars and replace it with something else such as ‘Games’ and the number of games you have. Or maybe it can be replaced with something else. Of course, it’s just an option. I personally find the Rep useless.

14. Screen Savers & Settings – Having new [animated] screen savers for sale in the marketplace would be really great. This allows for more customizations. You should be allowed to change the screen saver settings a bit more. For example, changing the time for the screen saver to appear. It’s currently only 10 minutes. And by animated, I mean slide show.

15. Clear Cache – Certain games take advantage of the harddrive (such as Oblivion and a few others) for cache so the game can lo

Speed up the Xbox live arcade. The game count is annoying and slow. Can’t it just save the count unless something is installed or removed?

Jim

Well, at the moment, my only wish that has not been said is the ability to zoom images. Come on? PSP has a zoom, albeit a crappy one, but atleast its there.

Thanks for an awesome console.  My suggestions:

1. Screensaver with constantly-changing content to avoid burn-in.  I suggest the PS3 launch date/shipping numbers. ; )

2.  As previously stated, it takes Live Arcade WAY too long to count up its titles.  What’s it going to be like when I have 30 titles?  No need to cycle through icons when loading the count.  Just slows things down.

3. Perhaps it’s time to segregate Arcade titles by genre: Coin-Op, Puzzle, etc. instead of just lopping them altogether.  Might speed count loading.

4. Give the 360 the ability to play WMV and MPG files locally from the 360 hard drive or via CD/DVD.

5. Allow pictures to be loaded into the hard drive for slideshow playback.

6. Backups: Find a way to allow backup of BC "game saves" from the 360′s hard drive to the 360′s memory card.  I played Darkwatch all the way through on the 360 and unlocked extra content but now I can’t back it up in case the drive ever fails.  ***Some serious works needs to be done on this.***

7. Also, BC games should support the downloads it had (maps, DOA3′s booster content, UC2′s unlocked characters, etc.)

Thanks,

   Mike

Name of game in the drive on the dashboard

eject option on dashboard

fastfoward and rewind on music player

video streaming without having to fork out for a media centre PC

when you use your own pictures for a back ground on the dash you should be able to have a different pic on each blade.

great console, keep up the good work!

It would be nice to have the Videos folders organized so items are in subfolders.

Ie, Videos > Red vs Blue > [Episodes Here]

Sorry if this idea been posted before but I really like to see the ability to scheaduled auto-shutdown for xbox360, especially when you leave the xbox360 on for downloading demos and trailers. The default 4 hours (i might be mistaken) auto-shutdown is too short for me.

Heres my updated suggestions (from 18 through 22). Feel free to copy & paste them but make sure you give me credit though (especially to #22).

1. Guide Button in BC – Ability to use Xbox Guide Button when playing original Xbox backwards compatible (BC) games. For example, you are playing a BC game and you want to check your friends list. So just press the guide button and you can check your friends list and or other features.

2. BC Online – Remain online when playing BC games. It say say ‘[Gamertag here] currently playing Original Xbox Game’ or something like that.

3. Friend Groups – There should be a feature that allows you to add groups to your friends list. For example, "Family" group and it will have the gamertags below it. Then the regular ‘Friends’ group (default). You should be allowed to add as many groups as you like because some people would like to have some for certain games. Just to make it easier for people who have many friends online.

4. Deleting Games/Achievements – I believe this is one of the biggest issues for gamers. I know deleting individual achievements is not possible. But what about deleting a game from your ‘played games’? By deleting a game the achievements from that game will be deleted too. This also helps to make your ‘played games’ list more clean and organized.

5. Marketplace Notifications – I think this would be a nice feature. ‘Marketplace Notifications’ notifies the player of new content in the marketplace. A toast will pop-up on the screen telling you theres new content, etc. When the toast appears, you press the guide button and it will tell you whats new. You will have the option to be notified with the type of content you selected (XBLA, specific games, videos, etc.).

6. Hot News – A marquee headline of some sort can be added to the UI. The headline will only appear when you are online. It will display important news in real-time related to Xbox 360. It doesn’t have to be a marquee though. It can be anything.

7. Video Improvements – When Xbox 360 is connected to Media Center, watching videos doesn’t have many options. There should be an option for the video to repeat it self over and over again.

8. Mac Compatible – I know theres a small percentage of Mac users. But it would be cool if Mac users could connect their Macs with Xbox 360 to stream music, videos, and pictures. By the way, I’m not a Mac user. But I will be one soon.

9. Saved Media – Saving media (pictures, music, video, etc.) to the harddrive would be great. I know you can save music already. But you need to format the burned CD into an audio cd. Maybe more options to save would be nice (DVD and data CD).

10. More Customization – Themes and Gamer Pictures aren’t enough. Themes are basically wallpaper. More customization options would be nice. Not sure like what though.

11. Web Browser – A web browser would be fantastic. But not really needed. If it was added, the web browser should be under the Media blade. I think the Web Browser should be exclusive to Xbox Live Gold members.

12. Game Defaults – The Game Defaults don’t change the settings for any of your games. You still have to change them manually in each individual game. Game Defaults should have effect on all games. This small update would be helpful.

13. Rep replacement – On the Xbox Live blade, it shows your gamertag at the top. Your gamertag displays your rep and stars. It would be nice if we had the option to remove the Rep and stars and replace it with something else such as ‘Games’ and the number of games you have. Or maybe it can be replaced with something else. Of course, it should be optional to the gamer. I personally find the Rep useless.

14. Screen Savers & Settings – Having new [animated] screen savers for sale in the marketplace would be really great. This allows for more customizations. You should be allowed to change the sc

More resolutions for the VGA cable including real wide monitor aspect ratios of 16:10 (i will pay up to 5000 gamerpoints for this resolution) which annoys me since loads of people bought a 16:10 widescreen monitor not a plasma 16:9 tv to use the vga cable on, as for UI, customisable wallpaper blades, thats all i need really. this shouldnt be too hard as 16:10 aspect exists in 1440×900 which is below a 1280×1024 already available and blade customisation cant be that hard. other cool stuff id like to see is a video chat service while you play games (like private chat) and being able to record what you see on the xbox 360 via media player through the ethernet cable, higher spec pcs should be able to do this no problem.

P.S. if i watch a movie i sign out or take the ethernet cable out (wireless is by all means useless when you have a long cable considering setup, speeds and reliablitity [ and i have a cisco linksys]. anyway its not like your going to read emails or achieve gamer points for watching movies on your profile esp if you dont want to be disturbed.) Oh yeah a sign out of live option will be good instead of sign out of profile. more user content, moderated to what end i dont know on marketplace…. hmmm this is longer than i thought, but yeah first two i WANT and should be implemented. Non of this will be implemented, ive only got a fair hope of customisable blade wallpapers for each blade, no 360 UI designers gonna read this.  

Re: "Non of this will be implemented, ive only got a fair hope of customisable blade wallpapers for each blade, no 360 UI designers gonna read this."

Oh, they already have… fear not.

If someone wants to be able to erase Achievements from their drive, I say let them- but please make sure that there are plenty of warning to prevent someone from messing up and having to earn them all over again.

I want to know what I can delete in terms of save files- and yet not affect my Achievements. I don’t know how that information ties together, so I’m wary about deleting game saves.

All good suggestions, so no need for me to repeat any of them here.

I should stress though that the web browser would be really important seeing as the PS3 can do it, so from a competition stand point alone the 360 needs it.

Also, how come we can’t play iTunes downloaded songs? It’s not like having iTunes songs playing through the 360 is a violation of any copywrites, you can’t copy the music over and you can’t share it… so I don’t see what the problem is, I mean, they have these plug and play speaker things, how is it any different?  I just get frustrated cause I’ve bought a lot of iTunes stuff post iPod and none of it works (Least not last time I checked).

Kudos to MS for actually caring what the gamers think!

INTERNET BROWSER

Sony’s PS3 "Dasboard" seems to have it, if their E3 presentation is any indicator. Also Nintendo Wii, will offer a internet browser of its on.

Thanks for the comments, folks. We’re reading through the 1300+ on my blog to help us with the ongoing work on Xbox 360. This is an ongoing conversation with the community that we’re interested in maintaining, so thanks for your input.

- Ability to allow Xbox 360 to autoswitch resolution for back compat Xbox games so that they will always be widescreen on my TV…and then switch back to the default resolution.

- Don’t make me quit a game to go to dashboard. Put some kind of suspend functionality in there

- Put the name of the disc in the tray on the screen somewhere

- Keep track and display how much time i’ve spent playing each game (so I can be depressed)

-web browser with flash support would be good…

-stream video from the pc

Here’s an easy one:

When typing in the dashboard, the keyboard is the "abcdefg" type, which no one is familiar with.  It would be much easier to enter text on a "QWERTY" style layout.

1.  Video streaming via WMP 11 would be great.  I haven’t beta-tested this yet, but it needs to be clean of proprietary barriers too.  For example, if my PS3 allows me to stream Xvid and DivX so that I can watch my friend’s gameplay movies and gametrailers, etc. – but Windows Media Player doesn’t allow freeware codecs, then it won’t be as useful.

2.  Windows Media Player should be a nice utility and not aggressive.  I don’t want it running in my Quick Launch icon or violating security or privacy.  Also, I don’t want to pay more for it as there are plenty of freeware programs out that can do this and I shouldn’t have to pay for connectivity to my 360 as I doubt the PS3 will make me pay for this.  If needed to pay for development costs, get this out of the Xbox Live budget and limit this to Gold subscribers.  It must also not be adware.  Basically provide this service in a competitive way with freeware.  It should be a 360 feature and NOT an additional cost.

3.  If possible, integrate WMP 11 into the 360 console so that video can be played directly from a portable HD and/or play Itunes video from Ipods.  Allow us to transfer video files from and to various devices via the 360.

Moving past video-streaming:

4.  I’d like to be able to access all the demos on Xbox Live from the demo splash page, including the handy New demo list.

5.  Improve the UI to text wrap so that you can read the full names of files in their selection instead of having to select them to read the final details.

6.  Do not push the user back to the splash page upon selecting a dialogue as I’ve found (especially with small game additions – like the Chromehounds downloads or car downloads in car games) that I often want to have multiple downloads.  I can press back if I want out of the download selection.  Also, this doesn’t help Microsoft for purchasable (Microsoft point) items  as it removes the user from the point of purchase.

7.  Improve networking and cacheing so that there is not as much hang in downloading the software’s main page.  It is usually just a simple picture and text message, so I don’t understand why I’m getting a 3-second hang here sometimes.  Extremely low priority on this change, but it is something that could improve.

8.  Maybe in looking at UI improvements you could consider using more of the screen. There is a lot of unused space even when viewing the dashboard in 4:3.  In some cases more information could be provided.  In others, larger fonts could be used.  Certainly framing is nice and easier to read, but text that wraps after every third word is a bit much.  Text boxes should generally be given better horizontal space than they are given. . .  often the design uses vertical boxes (like in the XBLA game descriptions) when horizontal boxes would be clearer.

Say it with  me, people:

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