Xbox Dev Comments On Feedback For The New Dashboard

Earlier this month, Microsoft unveiled a brand-new 'Home' UI for Xbox Insiders that would be tested throughout the year, with plans to bring the final version to all users in 2023. Unfortunately, initial feedback wasn't exactly very positive on the design (although poll results were mixed here at Pure Xbox), leading to some disgruntlement.

Now, Xbox Product Manager Ivy Krislov has been talking a bit more about the plans for the Home UI in an interview with Major Nelson, telling him that she reads feedback from Xbox Insiders every morning, and the team is taking that feedback into meetings when planning the next tests and iterations of the dashboard:

"I get an email every morning at 8AM with your feedback. It's the first thing that I read."

"The feedback we've gotten so far with the test has been that the top row is obscuring dynamic backgrounds a little more than some customers would like, and I can empathise with that... So, we actually have a meeting set up for tomorrow to go look at all that feedback and start to talk about how we'd address this - what tweaks we want to make for the next test which we are currently planning to do in October."

During the conversation, Krislov explained that evaluations will continue into the next calendar year (although there's no official end date), with plans for more features to be implemented in future tests:

"We are not even anticipating having something we would send to everybody until towards the end of this calendar year, and at that point we'll continue to be evaluating feedback that we're getting from the program and making a call based on how successful we are."

Krislov went into much more detail about some of the decisions surrounding the new dashboard, as well as plans for future tests in her conversation with Major Nelson, which you can watch in the video below (it's a timestamped link!).

Here's another sample of what she had to say:

"As you scroll down on Home, you will see a lot of content that is served from our service backend, and this is the aspect where everything is super flexible, we're able to change things kind of at the drop of a hat... We've started by building an infrastructure where we can put different game channels with curation, with personalisation, with customisation in front of the customer, and then as we progress through these tests, [we'll be] adding more different content types in.

So, for example, for customers who use their console to watch TV, we're going to be adding a media experience. The other one we know we want to tackle for this one - most likely for our third test - is taking the game blocks that customers already pin to home, and evolving them to look and feel more like this new version. We also hope to add more information to those blocks."

Have you received the new Xbox dashboard yet? How are you feeling about it? Tell us down below.

[source youtube.com]