The New New New Xbox Experience Halo4 Dash

[chopemon]

In the screen shots, the Family Centre image is of the same avatars as exist in the profiles on the system.

Did the image come first and the avatars made to match, or does the system capture the avatars present on the system and put them in the image (and potentially other parts of the dashboard)?

[EvilBoris]

I'd guess it renders out an image of the family for that menu, much like it already does for web use

[Kaosu]

As someone in the minority who doesn't like the NXE (is it still called that?) interface, this looks... worse.

I really am hoping this is just some Kinect feature, because the blades style Guide (which is the only redeeming factor) now looks bland.

[Finsbury Girl]

The mum has a suspiciously large number of points. A wee bit too much time on her hands?

[Neon Ignition]

Doesn't seem overly different from the current dash though that's as much a curse as a blessing as I'm in the camp that thinks the NXE is the worst of the 3 menu systems this gen. They should just make it a basic menu system where everything is lightning quick to navigate instead of trying to be fancy about it. Though I will be happy if the new version sorts out the awful marketplace... though by the screens it seems unlikely

[randombs]

^^ Hell yeah.

I'm fed up with how slow it is to send/receive messages, drives me nuts especially in SF when I'm trying to send the other player a message like 'last game' or whatever, even with the keyboard. By the time I've done it the next match will have started. If they're not going to speed it up (or at least give you the option of disabling the animations), I wish they'd have stock (and custom) phrases you could choose when you're in a hurry.

[FelixofMars]

To be fair the original one was horribly slow with typing out messages. It would lag on every other word. I don't think the NXE is anywhere as slow as the first dashboard incarnations.

[Jebus]

It started ok for me, but the "NXE" is horribly slow now, just like the old one...cache cleared etc but sometimes I think it's crashed!

[sj33]

Quite frankly, I hate the NXE as it currently is. I did think I'd get used to it after the while (like I did with XMB, which I now love), but even now I find it such a chore to find something within its multiple tiers with unintuitively-named catagories. And buying anything from the Live Marketplace which isn't a new release is an even harder task. When XBMC did things so right over 5 years ago, it's always stuck me as bizzare that they didn't learn something from it.

So I really hope this is an improvement.

[Flabio]

Buying games from Live is getting it's own 'app' soon (a little like how they did the 'rockband store' app to replicate the in-game interface in a stand alone program).

[Jebus]

Ultimately...any UI that takes 5-6 clicks to see the newest release, is a poor one.

They have a huge amount of content and it's really poorly displayed.

[charlesr]

If they change it so you can see both sides (or above and below) of the current focus that will be a start. The whole interface sucks badly.

The ability to customise what goes where would be nice.

[FelixofMars]

I agree the buried menus are bloody insane and its very poor UI design but speed wise I never had a problem with navigation. I am wondering if those having issues have a HDD issue. My friend was getting a slow dash and slow load times on games and he tried a borrowed HDD and it now works fine.

Either way I cannot say I got attached to any of the xbox interfaces so far. At least this one looks a little cleaner that NXE. IF they could sort out the amount of levels you have to navigate down and make settings like change dashboard theme easy to find I would be happy.

The thing is most of the options they give you now seem unnecessary. They could do away with having menus like Popular Games/New Titles etc by making it a filter. I find that even when I go to those I have repeated titles anyway. Maybe a basic search with preemtive text from their catalogue of games etc would be better like the way Windows 7 works.

[Jebus]

Also, I don't want my console booting to the "Showcase" area, I want it on "My Xbox".

[cutmymilk]

Just make it like the XMB. Or, text based and simple. Smaller fonts, less jazz and easier to find stuff. Let us build our own menu too with things that are actually useful to the individual.