What you need to know
- The Xbox Dashboard is testing a sizeable UI and UX update at the end of the year for Xbox Series X.
- In the meantime, the Xbox One UI continues to improve, with the August 2020 update starting to roll out today.
- The August 2020 Xbox One update makes some nice changes to the Guide to make it easier to use, especially for new players.
- This includes a new Notifications Inbox, per-member party volume controls, and new tips built-in to the Guide menus.
The New Xbox Experience has begun Insider testing now, but an announcement snuck into Xbox's news post is the rollout of the August 2020 Xbox One update, which tweaks and improves the Xbox Guide further. The August 2020 Update has been in testing for a while, and doesn't make any major changes to the Xbox Experience, beyond some nice-to-have tweaks for the Xbox Guide.
Here's everything that's included in the August 2020 Xbox One update:
- Improved landing page. With the August 2020 Xbox One update, the Guide now has an improved landing page, with options for players to customize the order of tabs, new spacing and ordering, and a set of useful tools and options always-present at the bottom of the Guide, like the Microsoft Store, Search, and more.
- Notifications Inbox. There's also a new Notifications Inbox that curates notifications from alerts, game invites, messages, and even the upcoming Mobile Xbox App refresh into one place. This means you can have a central hub for all of your notifications.
- Parties & Chats improvements. The June 2020 Xbox One update saw the Parties and Chats screens combined into one, and now the experience is being improved upon even more. Chats now have text previews for messages, while individual volume controls are available for party members, useful if a party member is too loud or too quiet.
- Activity Feed look. The Activity Feed is a great way to keep track of what's going on in the Xbox community, but can be messy and confusing. The Activity Feed is being updated so that all entries are given the same treatment, and are visually the same size. There should also be smaller improvements to how the Activity Feed works, and shortcuts to easily get to content related to individual posts.
If you're looking for major changes, you'll have to wait for the anticipated end-of-year New Xbox Experience update heading to Xbox One and Xbox Series X consoles, but until then Microsoft will continue to improve and build upon the existing Xbox Experience with new features and refinements. This is especially true with the Guide, which gets lots of attention, being something players interact with constantly while using their Xbox console.
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