Notification options. Currently, you can turn notifications on or off. As Microsoft starts integrating Twitter and Facebook into its dashboard interface, it should take a page from social networking protocol and give users more control over how we want to be contacted. Personally, I’d turn off achievement notifications and announcements of friends logging on, but leave on direct messages and invitations. I dislike being distracted during an immersive game by anything besides an invitation to play some other game (and if I don’t want even that, I’ll make myself appear offline). I know that some players are similarly distracted by achievements, but might still want to see the comings and goings of their friends. It can’t imagine it would take much to offer more robust user control over this.

Sensible navigation. I once wrote a very long critique of the New Xbox Experience’s confusing, disorganized, and bloated interface, and have since commented on how the Web Marketplace demonstrates that more sensible navigation is indeed possible. My comments still stand. And I don’t imagine that Microsoft is interested in taking the focus off advertising, but considering that we are paying $50 a year for access to this service already, is it too much to ask that they not drop us in the Spotlight channel every time we go to the Dashboard?

Customizable sounds. I don’t actually care about this feature, really. I just thought it would be cool if I could change the sound for when you get an achievement to the “extra life” music from the old Sonic the Hedgehog. I’d turn off achievement notifications for most games, but for something like Geometry Wars, that would really get me pumped.

Unfortunately, this means navigating the completely unintuitive and overly complicated navigational structure that is the Video Marketplace. There is a much, much more straightforward Web Marketplace which allows you to click on stuff in a web browser and send it directly to your console, but you can’t use that for this. Instead, you must find it through your console, browsing through lists of items so long that there’s no telling what they contain. Larry “Major Nelson” Hyrb, Director of Programming for Xbox Live, explains:

Due to the way this free episode works in our system, you can’t queue it up from the Web Marketplace. You’ll have to go grab it old skool style when you are on your console. Once you sign in head to Video Marketplace > TV Shows > Network and Studios > Comedy Central > The Daily Show with Jon Stewart > Season 14 > then scroll down to the The Unedited Interview Between Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer. (Kinda makes you appreciate the Web Marketplace, huh?)

No, Larry, it kinda makes me wish that the navigational interface of the New Xbox Experience didn’t suck. The Web Marketplace is proof that there are better ways to do this. I’ll jump through these hoops to get this one video I want, and I thank you for these instructions here—because if it weren’t for that, there’s no way I would’ve bothered digging through all those layers myself.

This needs to be fixed if Microsoft wants the Xbox to actually be used as the go-to living room device for anybody besides the hardcore nerds who read gaming sites, know about the Web Marketplace, or are willing to spend millennia browsing for content . In the meantime, Microsoft, please feel free to flash a warning message whenever we try to use the Marketplace on the console: “Save yourself the headache! Marketplace.xbox.com is way easier than this.”

Basically, you set some parameters on the site linked above, add a button to your bookmarks toolbar, and hit that button anytime you want to put the text on a page into a neat column. As far as I can tell, this works by replacing the stylesheet of whatever page you’re looking at, which means that it could be going even further than it is now. Just refresh the page to make it go back to normal. It’s not perfect—one page I tried it on ended up losing a graphic that should’ve been included—but it is an “experiment,” after all. I’m hoping future versions of this will let us mess with fonts and leading a bit more.

Update: I can’t help but notice that using this on our own Doombot.com works all wrong. Hah. From now on, I test to see whether a service makes me look good before I recommend it to the world.

My first reaction to the game covers was, I wish game covers really looked like this. Upon further reflection, though, I realized how misleading that would be. These look great—but by and large, they’re aesthetically disconnected from the games’ visual and narrative style. I could imagine some of the older games sporting covers like these, such as some of the Sim City covers and a Missile Command cover, and perhaps one Mirror’s Edge cover actually resembles the style of the cut scenes in that game. Many of these, however, are lovely but downright hilarious (and often intentionally so, I wager) in their stylistic incongruity with the original games. The Harry Potter redesigns, meanwhile, work decently well, in my opinion.

Part of the reason covers in the “classics” styles wouldn’t really work for games is that many of the featured titles have a clear visual style already, whereas the cover alone defines the visual style for most novels. (Notice that the game covers that might work are generally for games with much less developed or more abstract graphics.) But that’s not the whole story, I think. Part of the incongruity is that most games are still testosterone-soaked gorefests with no attempt to transcend their period or genre. It’s hard to see a work as a true “classic” when its greatest aim is to achieve a multi-generation franchise, and its greatest legacy will be as a piece of nostalgia.

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.

I guess it’s pretty interesting, but it also kind of feels like an infinitely recurring series of disappointments. You get to 100% loaded … and suddenly you move on to another loading screen. Even with our all combined evil, I don’t think we at Doombot could’ve done any better.

Update: Tony tinkered with some code and actually created the cruelest loading screen ever. Once again the internet has made dreams appear as reality right before our eyes.

The jugs are cheaper to ship and better for the environment, the milk is fresher when it arrives in stores, and it costs less.… But if the milk jug is any indication, some of the changes will take getting used to on the part of consumers. Many spill milk when first using the new jugs. “When we brought in the new milk, we were asking for feedback,” said Heather Mayo, vice president for merchandising at Sam’s Club, a division of Wal-Mart. “And they’re saying, ‘Why’s it in a square jug? Why’s it different? I want the same milk. What happened to my old milk?’ ”

I suspect that different people will have different opinions about what the problem is here. Some—like the those behind these milk jugs—are saying that people are just too stubborn and need to learn to change with the times. Others—like those who dislike spilling milk, cleaning milk, or having to pour milk for children who can’t lift the redesigned jug—might contend that the problem here is that you ask for feedback before you design the damn jug.

I think it’s great that designers have begun taking things like environmentalism into consideration. But I also think that, at its heart, all product design is fundamentally about the creation of interfaces (according to people who are way smarter than I am). Making a milk jug which saves costs and materials is great—but if it doesn’t function as something people can recognize and use, well, then it’s a failure.

Mind you, this doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. Maybe you remember the new prescription bottle designed by a grad student at the School of Visual Arts. The thing is brilliant: more usable and more environmentally friendly. (Shame on the FDA for ignoring the thing, and kudos to Target for realizing what a step forward it is.)

Whereas the starting point for the redesign of this milk bottle was likely an economic concern, the pill bottle started with a human concern. Namely, the designer’s grandmother took the wrong medication because all prescription bottles tend to look the same, and usually highlight pharmacy branding and other inessential material over more crucial info (like, say, the actual name of the drug, or who the drug is for). The designer went through a number of different versions to see what would work for elderly people and users with sight issues, and ended up with something simple and more efficient.

Will it be worth teaching people the special trick to pour the new milk bottle? Maybe , in the long run, it will. But what would be smarter would be to get a group of people together to represent the interests of the average milk drinker (and pourer) during the design process to make sure that an important group of stake holders is represented. When people start crying over spilled milk, a good designer doesn’t admonish them for it; we go back to the drawing board.