Xbox One Experience is here! Roll-out has begun

The new Xbox One experience is here – and it’s beautiful.

Certain preview program members will receive to the roll-out in waves so if you don’t get a chance to have a tinker with it just yet don’t worry because it won’t be long until the full roll-out hits.

“Our focus for the completely redesigned dashboard is speed, ease of use, and—of course—fan feedback.” – Larry Hryb

The nature of the preview program is for those in it to test everything, push it to the limit and find where it breaks so that everything can be polished all shinny before the release to the wider community. So if you are one of the preview program members that gets the opportunity to play around with the new Xbox experience, please do so and send your feedback in.

This update doesn’t come with Backwards Compatibility just yet but it is a step towards getting ready for it this fall.

 

The key features are:

– A redesigned Home to help you truly jump in.

– Quickly jump to Pins and My Games and Apps.

– A new guide for fast access to essentials.

  • Friends and Parties – See which of your friends are online, join their parties, or click a button to instantly start a party and then add friends to it.
  • Notifications – Instead of having to go back to Home to launch the Notifications Center full screen, new notifications will show up directly in the Guide and be grouped to make them quicker and easier to navigate.
  • Messages – Just like notifications, multiple messages from a given friend will be both quickly accessible from the guide and neatly grouped.
  • Settings – Frequently-accessed settings like headset volume will be up-leveled in the settings section of the guide to make them quicker to get to in the guide while you are playing a game.
  • Snap – You now access your snap apps from the guide. In addition, apps snap to the left instead of the right.

– OneGuide is your single destination for TV, movies, and video apps.

  • Live TV – Keeping with our focus on speed, OneGuide’s TV listings come up instantly and in full-screen, showing more channels at once. We also added picture-in-picture mode for TV, so you can browse OneGuide without missing what’s happening in your show.
  • Movies and TV shows – Explore more movies and TV shows with dedicated galleries, highlighting the best that Xbox has to offer from live TV and apps.
  • App channels – Discover new things to watch through curated channels of streaming video from apps like Hulu and FOX NOW. Accessible from the dashboard and throughout OneGuide, app channels help you find what to watch faster.

– A new, easier to navigate Store.

  • Four easy to access areas – Games, Movies and TV, Apps, and Music will have more real estate on the main Store page dedicated to surfacing top content to you.
  • New vertical gallery view – Using Games as an example, the all-new vertical gallery view within each area affords more listings to be showcased at a glance and the listings themselves are optimized for easier browsing with intuitive categories like Featured Staff Picks, New Releases, Top Played, Top Rated, Coming Soon and Recommendations.

– Optimization of design, layout with changes to UI and features.

  • Game Hubs – With more entry points throughout the new experience, the new Game Hubs provide similar content as the current Game Hubs but by changing the design we have improved discoverability and speed.
  • Game DVR – You’ll now go to the Game DVR app, instead of the Upload app, to manage your clips and screenshots.
  • Achievements – Your game progress can be viewed on your profile and you’ll find achievements in the Game Hub for each game. If you want to track achievement progress in real time while you are playing, you can do that by snapping the Achievement Tracker app.

Major Nelson’s blog goes into a LOT more detail about each of these key features so if you are interested in knowing more please head on over there to check it all out.