How can the Playstation 3’s friends list be improved?
September 11, 2009 by
Filed under Blog, News, Playstation
The good folks over at Sony have recently released the latest iteration of the PS3’s firmware. Firmware 3.0 is by all intensive purposes a substantial improvement over the last firmware, its has functionality for dual audio output, it allows you to test your internet connection and while some may argue the point, I think it looks better than ever before but the friends list is a big step backward.
Functionally the friend’s list is sound, you can view the trophies of friends, create and read messages, add and remove friends. The usability of these features however is not so sound. My first gripe with the friends list is the path you have to take to read a message. First you hit Triangle which brings up a contextual menu, then you have to select read messages, from there you have to figure out which is the newest message and press X on that message. This process un-intuitive and rather arduous. When using the PS3’s XMB, pressing X allows you to enter the highlighted option, it is the main action button on the contoler, why then when a friend is highlighted does pressing X jump to their trophy list and not the message contextual menu?
My guess is that the primary and most common reason for visiting a friends in your list is to see if they are online, then to see what they are playing, send or read a message and finally to see their trophy list. My rework of the usability of a friend would be to switch the function of the Triangle button with the X button. Pressing X will take you to the friends contextual menu and pressing Triangle will display the friends trophies. Then I would modify the order of the messages according to date, newest messages at the top and oldest at the bottom. This would make sense of the order which at times can get really confusing.
The new design of the friends list absolutely confiuzzles me, to call it a step backward is an understatement. It’s more of a step backwards and then off a cliff. Visually it’s horrendous, clearly the designer wanted to make it look Apple-ish but in doing so bastardized it from the rest of the XMB. The two mix together visually like oil and water. It’s is apparent that the first thing that I would do to improve the look of the friends list is drop the ghastly grey box. It’s nice that the designers wanted to unify a friends attributes into one contained compartment but in it’s current execution it doesn’t work and if it must be contained a simple 40% opaque black bounding box would do the job just fine.
In its current state the XMB friends list is usable but it’s not a pleasant experience, Sony have done a great job at improving and adding features to the PS3′s firmware but I feel that now is the time for refinement. They need to look less at adding features and more at improving the gamers experience, especially so when it comes to the XMB friends list.
How would you change the XMB Friends list?
Related posts:
I hate Fizz !!
I know it’s a little girly but I like the fizz