New Xbox One User Interface Video Released by Major Nelson

Written by Brandon Hofer on June 25, 2015

News: Microsoft has released a walkthrough video showcasing the brand new Xbox One user interface that will be released later this year.

The Xbox One user interface is getting a massive facelift later this year. It looks completely different, has some different functionality and appears to run much quicker. When you first start up your Xbox One you will be greeted with a brand new home screen where it shows the last thing you did on the console along with the last few games and/or apps that you used. It looks very clean and very slick and gives you immediate access to the Game Hub, recent clips you have taken so you can share them and anything the developer has recently posted, such as patch notes. If you scroll down a little bit you will see your pins are there waiting for you as well.

The top row of the new interface has your Gamertag on the top left of the screen along with three different menus: “Home,” “Community” and “Store”. The “Home” menu has a lot of the items I just mentioned in the previous paragraph. The “Community” tab features a number of different things, including your activity feed. It is there front and center for you to look at so you can see what your friends are doing, what achievements have been unlocked, who is streaming and more. There is also a section on the right side of the screen where you can see what is popular and trending on Xbox Live whether it be a Twitch stream for Halo 5, a bunch of people posting about a certain game, a person that has been posting a lot of videos that have turned out to be really popular and more. The “Store” section should be self explanatory and will be where you buy games from the Xbox Live marketplace, download demos and games in Xbox’s early preview program and much more.

Now on the left of the screen you have a quick menu. This will give you some really quick access to your friends list, to a party if you happen to be in one, your messages and notifications, and some more settings such as being able to turn off your Xbox One quickly. It should also be noted that these quick menus are overlayed whatever is going on at the moment. What this means is that you could be playing Halo 5 and be able to do all of this stuff without leaving your game. Similar to how it used to work on Xbox 360, you just have to double tap the big Xbox button your controller and it will bring up the quick menu like you used to do with the blades on the 360. This makes it really easy to invite your friends to parties and to get a game going.

Additionally, if you have a Kinect you are going to be getting a lot of very cool uses out of this new interface. If you are in the middle of match in Gears of War and you want to see if one of your friends is online, all you have to do is ask Cortana whether they are online or not. If they are online Cortana will say so making it so you don’t have to check your friends list and interrupt the action, you can literally just ask the Xbox. Another feature they are teasing is how Cortana will help you in games. The example they gave was playing Fable Legends and asking Cortana what the next mission was and she immediately came back and told you the name of the next mission. This could potentially work really well if you are in an open world game, for example, and have forgotten where you need to go next to progress in the campaign. You can even tell Cortana to start a party and invite your friend so that you could be racing the countryside in Forza Horizon 2 and you never have to let up on the gas pedal to get a party started with friends.

Assuming this works as they are promising this could be a really great reason to pick up a Kinect if you don’t already own one. There are going to be many other features with this new Xbox One interface that Microsoft will talk about at a later date. Until then check out the walkthrough below and tell us what you think. Are you excited for this new change?