Okay, so, one of the things I have actually done regularly on this blog (to the extent that I’ve done anything regularly at all) is complain about user interfaces. I feel I have a right to to do this because 1) I read a book about it once, and 2) as a reasonably intelligent user I ought to be able to. So, today I’m going to complain about the NXE user interface. This is what it looks like:

For those of you who haven’t used it in person yet, this is a map of what the important areas are:

Basically the whole thing is two-tiered: There’s a top-level list of views, like My XBox, Video Marketplace, etc., which you move between using up and down. Then there’s the second-tier, which is a Cover Flow-ish list of pictures on a shiny floor you move through using left and right. This is a little cleaner than the Blade thing, and I assume they’re trying to emulate the XMB here — I can’t speak for that because I haven’t got a PSP or PS3 to really mess around with. Anyway, I say Cover Flow-ish because of two things: First, it doesn’t do the flippy thing, and second, the current selection is always on the absolute left of the screen. In other words, if you have item N selected, items 0 … N-1 are invisible.

Now, I know it looks very pretty and all, but I see a pair of issues with this. First, it feels really unbalanced. Cover Flow puts the current selection in the center, because it feels really weird if it isn’t. You don’t have to go to art school to know that the focus of a picture should be in the center. The second issue is more annoying: you have no idea what is to the “left” of your selection. You just have to rely on memory or holding left on the stick until what you want appears. Imagine how annoying it would be if you only could see a picture of your current selection in the list, and nothing else: this is halfway there. Note that this isn’t a list where it “pages,” i.e., if you move to the last visible selection item, it moves to the next page, and your selection is at the start of the visible part of the list again. The selection is always the first item in the visible part of the list.

There’s a similar problem with the top-level view list as well, in that items have this falloff effect where the farther from the selection they are, they fade out. The list of top-level views is only maybe six or so items long, I don’t know why we need some kind of a fancy effect to hide two or three of them.

I’m sure they made it work this way because it looks cool in motion, but it annoys me because if they spend a whole lot of time supposedly making the UI better, you’d think they wouldn’t miss things like “if a list scrolls, show the selection in the center” and “don’t hide half of the list so the user has to guess what the previous items are.” I don’t want to drag out the whole Apple versus Microsoft thing again, but here we have a clean-cut example of Microsoft doing something Apple pulled off well, and making some brain-dead mistakes in terms of the little touches that make a good UI, like balance and visibility.

Note that I’m not a Cover Flow fanboy or something here; I have no idea what the heck why we need Cover Flow to browse albums. 90% of my iTunes library has no cover art, and even if it did it is way faster to look through a normal list of album/artist names than flip through the covers. Also, Cover Flow has the albums adjacent to your selection rotated inwards, so you can’t really see them square-on. The only possible benefits I can think of are that it looks cool in ads, and it’s “fun.” So, I can see why XBox wants those, but if you’re going to make it your primary UI, you ought to think it through a little more. This is just going to be bugging me for eternity now.

ADDENDUM RE: NETFLIX

I also noticed some stupid things about the Netflix store, when I was trying to see how the new streaming works. You see, my dad has a Netflix account, but I’ve never used it directly. Anyway, so I go download the Netflix program on the XBox, do the activation dance. (Side note: the activation was surprisingly easy — I was afraid I’d have to enter a username and password on the XBox, which is doubly dangerous because typing on the XBox is slow and my dad probably doesn’t remember either of those, but they just give you a code you punch into the website on your PC and it activates that way.) It comes up with this list of films in my dad’s Instant Queue.

So, this is the first thing: what the hell is an Instant Queue? It seems like one of the rare cases of finding a genuine oxymoron out in the wild — if you can watch the movie instantly, why do you need an analogue of the queue used to send DVDs to your house? After being completely baffled by this concept for a few minutes, I figured out that it’s basically just a movie bookmark system. I guess they just named it a “queue” because everyone on Netflix is already used to queues and they didn’t want them to adjust to a whole different noun.

But this is the weird thing — apparently you have to add the movies to your Instant Queue on your PC, and then you sign in on your XBox and they’re available for showing. In other words, there’s no Netflix browser on the XBox that I can see. This is sort of annoying, and I would make an analogy to having a console web browser where you can only look at things you’ve bookmarked already. I do sympathize: browsing on the PC is a whole lot faster, if you’re actually on the PC. I still think it’d be possible to make a passable system to look through the available movies for streaming, though, seeing as there’s not a lot of them (and 90% of them look like crap).

Here’s the other thing, and this is just bizarre:

The “Add to Instant Queue” button is always hidden, like a rollout, inside the “Play” button. This is really confusing when the help tells you to use that button to add things to your Instant Queue and you can’t see it. Is there any reason at all for this? One of the basic principles in UI design is you make your UI elements visible, not hidden, only to be revealed with some kind of bizarre mouseover action. They could have just, you know, had that button underneath the Play button. It’s not that hard.