Jason Chen on why the New Xbox Experience won't sell Xboxes

The complete user interface overhaul of the Xbox 360 is almost upon us. Come late November, every single Xbox user will have their familiar blade interface - oft touted as a smart design choice because it mirrored the “inhaling” shape of the console itself - changed to an entirely different navigational structure. A structure, in our opinion, that seems to be a lot less structured and a lot more free-form. Is it good? Is it bad? Does it even matter? First off, a quick recap on the new features. The New Xbox Experience (or NXE) makes you cycle through menus by using a horizontal and vertical scrolling scheme. Instead of individual list items being, you know, items on a list, they’re big, squareish icons that you can easily identify at a glance. The problem with this is that you can only see a few entries at once, forcing you to actually scroll quite a ways to find the item you want. Then there’s cool stuff like Avatars (think Nintendo’s Miis, but with fewer ... (link)