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Crafting The 360 Interface

Posted by Zonk on from the shiny-interactions dept.

MaxConsole writes "Over at Designinteract they have a very interesting feature running on how the Microsoft interface design manager (Russ Glaser) completed the Xbox 360 user interface. The feature goes into depths on the whole two year project for the Xbox 360, the problems they encountered, the testing phase, requirements for the interface as well as the animation and experience design. The feature concludes 'the Xbox 360 interface came in under 3MB. It is slick and fast and, its designers hope, successful.'"

5 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Props to Neal Stephenson! by bushidocoder · · Score: 2, Informative

    Hiro Protagonist is the XboxLive username for J Allard, the Corporate Vice President of the Xbox360 development.

  2. What Microsoft can actually do by alvinrod · · Score: 3, Insightful
    It's nice to see a little dose of careful planning and good execution from the people at Microsoft. I'll take things with a grain of salt until I can actually see and use the interface for myself, but it sounds like they put some thought and effort into it.

    Microsoft is generally better known for (what most would call) the pile of crap OS known as Windows. Given how most of their products turn out, MS has gained a largely negative reputation. However it's nice to see the people working on the Xbox obviously don't suffer the same shortcomings as everyone else at the company does.

    Considering that more and more people will likely begin to switch to Linux or Apple in the coming years, it's interesting to think that Microsoft will rely on the Xbox more and more in the future. In any event it's nice to see that there are a few competent people working there still.

  3. Very pretty but... by It+doesn't+come+easy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's just a tabbed dialog box revisited, moving the tabs to the side of the window and stretching them out to the height of the page. Looks nice but they will still have a problem if there are too many tabs needed...

    --
    The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
  4. Interface? by Bellum+Aeternus · · Score: 3, Insightful
    For an article about an interface on a web site about interfaces, the interface sucked!

    Screenshots that cannot be enlarged, but are too small to see
    The screenshot on page 1 links to page 2
    The screenshots on other pages are not linkable.
    And the damn ad at the top kept trying to talk to me; I'm at work! O_o

    Otherwise, the 360's interface looks cool. Gotta play [no pun] with it a bit before I have any real comments.

    --
    - I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
  5. Re:Something that finally gets me interested in XB by Anm · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Based on the hype at the Game Developer Conference, this is exactly the direction they are going: Built in interface into MSN Music (or whatever it will be called), sync to your iPod, play your playlist inside any game, and chat with other XBox Live friends regards of whether either of you are playing a game, let alone the same game. I'm surprised they aren't going the DVR direction (as a hard drive / video input adapter combo package).

    It is a cool concept, and a huge problem for Sony to compete with. With XBox's existing userbase, just meeting the feature set will not be enough to survive in the online world.

    Anm