Xbox, why? The baffling incompetence of the Xbox One interface

http://media.edge-online.com/wp-cont...x-One-home.jpgIt looks like an improvement. And as long as you aren’t actually using it, it is. The Xbox 360’s sprawling, multi-layered, ad-splattered interface, crammed as best as the engineers could manage into hardware that was never designed to support it, has been replaced by an elegant three-pane view. Home shows recent activity, Pins shows user-created shortcuts, Store holds everything you might want to buy.Advertising, though present, is less obtrusive. Three blocks on the main screen are apparently targeted based on user activity, and even if they aren’t then it’s hardly the obstruction that it used to be. Not having a social feed in the main interface, like PS4, is a missed opportunity, although to Microsoft’s credit it takes only a single button press to launch the quick-loading, Facebook-like activity feed. It’s when you try and do anything from here that problems arise.Mindful of its prior issues updating the functionality of Xbox 360, Microsoft has elected to make almost every system function an app. This might make more sense from a development point of view, enabling more rapid updates – and for Microsoft’s sake, let’s hope so – but Xbox One’s debut user experience is stuttering, clunky, and a serious challenge to Xbox Live’s long-held status as the premier console service. Bluntly, they take too long to load, don’t offer the functionality that Xbox Live was built on, and are, inexplicably, badly handled by the OS.The most perfect example of Microsoft ruining its prior work is Achievements, and the number of hoops you have to jump through to view them. Rather than the quick tap of yore, you have to spend several seconds holding the button down. This, incredibly, then reboots the Achievement app – even if it’s already running – in order to display some challenges, which you have to skip past to view an Achievement list built not around charmingly crafted icons but a slew of previously-released screenshots, which take several seconds to appear and then have to be selected to show what you did to unlock them.

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