After the disappointing Spring Update, or lack thereof, you may be expecting some massive overhaul to the 360′s user interface. Alternatively, you might be expecting a restructuring of Xbox Live Marketplace? Either way, the guys over at The Fanboys have come up with some really cool conceptual dashboard redesigns.

Hit the jump to have a look (and hear my rantings) .

Basically The Fanboys split up the current 360 dashboard into a grid and worked out that 11.5% of the dashboard is user space like gamercard and messages, 22.5% was advertising space, 29.5% was interactive space such as the disc tray and 36.5% was unused space. Which is pretty interesting (that wasn’t sarcastic. Neither was that. Or that)

Anyhoo, they came up with a redesign. Take a look.

(Hi-res version here)

Ok there’s quite a lot on there so let’s look at it bit by bit.

Completely forget the right section of the screen for the moment, lets just focus on the left hand section. As you can see the friends and messages are still on the same button, then the Chat and IM button, and finally the gamerscore (which I presume would go to your gamercard when clicked. That’s all fairly standard stuff, but next there is a search box that can search either your 360 or the Marketplace. I don’t think this is really that useful as things can be sorted alphabetically anyway, and it doesn’t take that long to navigate through the menus, but it certainly wouldn’t do any harm. There’s also a ‘In your tray’ section which, for the sick minded amongst you (you know who you are) might have various sexual connotations, but for us here in the non-innuendo (in your endo!…sorry) obsessed world, I think its a bit of a waste of space. I mean, on the current dashboard the achievement progress is displayed and I don’t think the box art adds anything significant. Also, what will be displayed there when there’s no disc in your tray? Unused space? It’s a nice idea, but I think it could have been made a bit smaller. The advertising has been moved to a small strip at the bottom left of the dashboard, which is always a good thing.

Just so you know, when you select the yellow gamercard section, the entire right area becomes your background (look at the first image in this article).

Right, now let’s have a look at the right hand side. This is the market place blade, and as you can see it has undergone some major changes. The best feature that The Fanboys have put in, is the user rating system. If you look closely (better res here) you’ll notice that each game has a star rating next to it. I’m not quite sure why Assault Heroes 2 has a full four out of four stars, but this is just a mock up after all. You’ll also notice that there is a strip of advertising on the far right, but this only appears on the marketplace. Now here’s the stuff I don’t like [brace for rant]. We all know that scrolling through the barrage of useless content on the Live Marketplace is a chore, but this redesign by no means alleviates the problem. Firstly instead of a small bit of text for each game, we now have images. This basically means that everything will take ages to load (as can be seen in the XBLA menu on the current dashboard). Granted, the space is used more wisely as there are now two games on each row instead of one, but I don’t want to have to slowly scroll through hundreds of pictures with the right analogue stick just to realise that the Eragon demo has been removed from the marketplace. It does not solve the problem, and might even exacerbate it. Useless. Anyway, let’s get onto some more positive things. I like the ability to view all the free content available…

I’m done with the good stuff now. Ok, maybe I’m being a bit too harsh. I did like the fact that the points balance is constantly displayed, but the bad scrolling system is unforgivable. The person who wrote this post says that he didn’t take technical aspects into account, but isn’t it obvious that hundreds of images would cause problems? What would have been good is the ability to see all content that you can afford. For instance: if you have 245 points left on your account, why not view all the content that is 245 points or less. I would find that pretty useful when trying to burn the 20 points I have left.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that the Inside Xbox feature has been moved to a small ticker strip at the bottom, which is both good and bad.

Good: The most pathetic feature on Xbox Live, in my opinion, is hidden nicely away at the bottom of the screen.

Bad: It’s animated and will constantly annoy me. I do not want to know that Major Nelson can tell me how to download items, or that MrPointyHead (UK) went to Ubi Days and I don’t want to see stupid interviews that have been edited and chopped up so that they’re 30 seconds long. I use the Internet for all my news and don’t need my 360 to keep me up to date with the latest Alone in the Dark trailers that are hitting the marketplace. It’s not even like the content is good. Some of the jokes made are so poor, I almost burst into tears.

*Deep breath*

So there you have it. A tour of The Fanboys 360 dashboard redesign. Even though I didn’t like some of their choices, it was a high quality image (720p) with several good ideas, but just a few too many annoying points for me to endorse. A dashboard redesign is needed, but I don’t think this is it.

Source: The Fanboys