When Microsoft announced its “New Xbox Experience,” including an update to its visual interface and a handful of new features, I wrote up a blog post cataloguing some of my thoughts on the changes the system had seen. And then, for reasons I can’t quite remember, I sat on that post for a long while. Perhaps it seemed too bitter, or too long-winded. Perhaps I suspected that my opinions would change over time, as I got used to the new setup or got a better handle of how to use it. I saved the post as a draft, and let it be for quite some time.

Now, four months later, my Xbox—you know, the one that has required multiple repair requests—sighed its last, heaving breath, blinking at me with a single bloodshot eye. Looking for something to do to pass the time before bed, I logged into Doombot and noticed I had a draft waiting to be posted. So, with bitterness in my heart and four more months’ of “Experience” under my belt, I can say with renewed confidence and rancor that this dashboard update feels like a poke in the eye by someone who is flashing a toothy grin.

Yes, there is a little bit I like about the Xbox’s fancy new dashboard update, but overall it feels like a net loss in terms of usability. The new party chat option (replacing one-on-one voice chats) is good. The new pop-up “guide,” which can be used to navigate everything you need on your console, is, in itself, good. The way everything is integrated, however, is awful, and the prioritizing of advertising over user experience is deplorable.

I can take or leave the new avatars (i.e., Mii ripoffs), and while the new dashboard interface’s aesthetic offers more style than substance, the visuals don’t really matter to me one way or the other. What burns me, though, is that Microsoft promised that the new guide—accessed anytime by hitting the big Xbox button in the middle of your controller—would be so streamlined and comprehensive that you could do everything you need from it, avatars be damned. This sounded like a good thing, in theory: The friends list in the dashboard was replaced with an alleyway of avatars that takes forever to scroll through. Among its other features, then, the guide has become the only place you can go for a simple list view of friends. Well, I like the guide, for the most part, but it turns out you can’t really do everything from it, and having access to it just says to me that someone at Microsoft can do decent information architecture but is being required to hide it inside something huge, stupid, and unwieldy.

The problem here is that the hierarchy of the guide doesn’t quite match the hierarchy of the dashboard, so you have to memorize two different paths to reaching everything if you ever want to use both. And, because certain guide options (like entering your games library) require you to go into the dashboard interface eventually, it’s not like you get to ignore it forever. Once you’re in the dashboard, your automatic inclination as a user is to keep using it to navigate, but this can quickly get confusing because things just exist in different places.

I waited awhile to post this because I thought maybe I’d get used to the two navigation schemes, and, to some extent, I have. It’s inelegant and kind of a pain, but I guess I learned my way around it the same way I learn my way around the interfaces that most cell phones get saddled with. At least Verizon doesn’t bring me to an ad page every time I open my phone, though, or make me view ads on every menu I scroll through—which brings me to my other major complaint.

When you start up the Xbox dashboard (which, for me, is whenever I start up the Xbox), you automatically go to the “Spotlight” channel, no matter what. This is, quite simply, a series of ads. It requires two or three clicks on your controller to get to the basic, useful information that used to be on the start screen. Even the new, streamlined guide has ads on some menus, but it’s not clear at first glance that they’re ads, so I ended up accidentally leaving the navigation entirely to end up on a page for paid, downloadable content in the Xbox Marketplace. Once leaving the guide, you can’t just hit “back” and go back to where you were in the navigation structure. No, “back” brings you back into Spotlight, the ad channel, of course. How very logical.

What was the word I used for this before? Ah, yes—”deplorable.” Microsoft should be ashamed. Hell, I’m a little ashamed myself. I feel stupid as hell that I give this company fifty bucks a year to give me the ability to play games with people online—a function that’s traditionally been free for PC and even other console gamers—just to have Microsoft further monetize the service by prioritizing advertising dollars over intuitive UI.

I can only hope that I’m not the only one complaining about this, that Microsoft will get the message and put its customers first. I appreciate that they’ve built a system that makes gaming with friends from the couch feel like an essential part of my precious free time, but I’m going to start looking for ways to hack this interface if they don’t get around to fixing it.

It feels good to get that all out of my system, but I suppose it might be more useful to actually suggest how Microsoft could add some value to its offerings. So, allow me to offer up one verbose user’s informed take on what would make a better, newer Xbox experience.

Offer a “starting channel” option in System Preferences.
We already have the ability to remove the pointless “Welcome” channel entirely. All modern web browsers let us define our own start page. Only the advanced users will make use of this anyway, and we’re the ones who are most likely to get irked that we can’t. It’s not like we’ll never look at Spotlight; we just don’t want to have to navigate away from it every single time we turn on the console. The way it is now just makes me associate Spotlight, and everything in it, with being intensely frustrated that I can’t get where I’m going.

Make navigation systems consistent and intuitive.
Currently, the dashboard’s top-level navigation looks like this:

• Spotlight (ads with no particular organizational scheme) 
• Events (ads … for scheduled events on the Xbox live)
• Inside Xbox (“free videos” which are, um, mostly ads)
• Friends (strewn about an alleyway)
• Video Marketplace
• Game Marketplace
• My Xbox

So, just to recap: Three items in the main navigation are for ad content. One is a channel to look at friends’ avatars, three at a time. Two are essentially links to online stores. And one is for “My Xbox.”

The last item mentioned there, accessed by hitting “up” on the controller after dropping into Spotlight, is the one that allows you to do things like play the game currently in the tray, view your gamercard (where hitting the A button takes you to another screen where you can edit your profile and handle account management), access your video library, and so on. Tucked in the back is the panel for your “system settings.” There’s kind of a lot of useful stuff—stuff you might access pretty regularly—jam-packed into that channel. Which, I’ll remind you, is not the channel you start in when you turn on your Xbox.

By contrast, here’s the navigation system of the guide that pops up when you hit the central button on your controller:

• main screen (friends list, chat options, play disc in tray, etc.) 
• games (games library, achievements)
• media (video, photo, or music library)
• marketplace (games marketplace, video marketplace)
• settings (profile options, preferences, family settings, etc.)

This is a fairly intuitive organizational scheme. It is not the same system used on the dashboard, but it could have been. Microsoft doesn’t necessarily have to ditch all the ad channels and “special” content, but it does need to make it so that the stuff users will need on day one (and, very likely, every day besides) is easy to find. We should not have to press a special button to get to the real navigation, period.

Send users to where they expect to go.
When I use my guide to go to the Video Library, I expect to end up at a screen that lists my videos in some order that makes sense—alphabetical, let’s say, or perhaps organized by category. I do not expect to end up at a list of “recently downloaded” videos placed in some weird-ass order, and including plenty of videos I’ve already watched but haven’t gotten around to deleting. I then have to hop over a window or two in order to actually find the videos that I actually want to see. In a way, this issue is what the New Xbox Experience seems to be about: trying to be hip and helpful, but just making life slightly harder and more annoying.

All of these complaints may seem pretty tiny and irrelevant on a system that is known for its frequent, catastrophic hardware failures. To me, though—and maybe to some of you—it all adds up. Having my console crap out three times in one year feels like kind of a kick in the pants as it is. On those occasions when it actually is working, I’d rather not have it feel like a cheerful poke in the eye.