News has been a little slim for the next-gen consoles up until the last three or four months. Unfortunately, due to the nature of 2020 and the pandemic at its height earlier this year, much of the yearly hype for a next-gen console release was silenced. Both Microsoft and Sony have been playing announcement "chicken" with another in terms of releasing news about the next-gen consoles. While announcing games for the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S is obviously priority number one for a gaming console, Microsoft and Sony had been unusually quiet about the smaller details. Sony moreso than Microsoft, but both hadn't shown any UI details until recently.
In terms of breaking news about the next-gen consoles, UI changes are generally towards the bottom of the list of priorities. Microsoft and Sony more than likely want to prioritize emphasis on the games that can be played on the new consoles, and the graphical/processing capabilities of said consoles. That being said, at the end of the day, fans do eventually want to know what's changed on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S user interfaces, even if it's not the most glorious news. Both systems have made improvements in their own respective ways on the UI, and while these refinements are largely iterative from PS4/Xbox One, they each vary in effectiveness.
Incremental Improvements for the PS5's UI
What's notable about the PS5's UI improvements is that they're subtle, but still impactful. Many fans maligned the PS4's system menus for often being laggy or slow, especially on the PlayStation Store. Even on PS4 Pro, swapping between different applications (that vary substantially in power draw) often meant allocating the least amount of system memory to running the UI, and thus would result in slowness or "lag." However with PS5, at least in the demonstration, it's clear there's been a dedicated effort in mitigating that problem and allocating enough memory at a time to keep the UI light, fast, and unobtrusive of the game experience. In spite of those apparent refinements, the big thing that players will notice is that there's already a lot of similarities to the PS4's UI design.
Occasionally that's a good thing, but in some cases it's not exactly helpful for the PS5. The new PS5 "action center" intelligently melds the PS4's home menu and quick menu together into one succinct overlay. Players will have to back out of games less often, especially when trying to join a party or share screen. However, many of the new features like the action center's "card" system (that can show tips and video guides mid-game) will more than likely be reliant on developer support. While many first-party games will likely utilize this new system fully, it's up to third-party developers if they want to place development time into the cards system. Plus, the home screen once again didn't show any capability of folders/organizing games, which was a major complaint for PS4. Overall, PS5's UI utilizes miniscule but important improvements.
Innovating New Features for the Xbox Series X/S UI
For Xbox One, the early UI design wasn't exactly the best. Following the design philosophy of Windows 8, a UI that even PC users didn't like on their Windows machines, Xbox One had one of the worst early UI designs. Xbox saw a lot of changes in the years since its big E3 controversy and the death of Kinect, and now the Xbox One's latest dashboard design is largely pretty good. From 2015 onward, the Xbox One's dashboard improved immensely after its significant overhaul. Even to this day, the design remains largely the same despite some minor reworks and refinements. Same goes for Xbox Series X UI, which Xbox fans will find is extremely familiar to the Xbox One.
Overall layout of the Xbox Series X/S UI is essentially just like the Xbox One's current dashboard, except with a few tweaks to improve the speed and uniformity of its design. There's also a pretty high degree of customization available to players, allowing them to choose the different subheadings/sections and organizing the different tiles and options within them. Also, one big thing with the UI that Microsoft is especially keen on marketing and talking about is "quick resume," which allows players to simultaneously swap between several different active games with minimal delay. It's an interesting feature for the multi-tasking players out there, who may want to keep a save state of another game open when their friend theoretically invites them to another game.
Two Slightly Different Approaches
Arguably the PS5 makes the most improvement from current-gen compared to the Xbox Series X, though that's also not saying much considering Xbox is toying with new concepts/features alongside a refined version of the Xbox One's UI design. Unlike PlayStation's efforts in improving the existing foundation from the PS4's UI in smart ways, Xbox Series X's UI is toying with new functionality that's independent of games themselves. Features like quick resume, the ability to customize the home page in various ways, alongside a new uniform layout doesn't necessarily mark more improvement, so much as it's trying new things to make the UI experience even better. PlayStation, as per its usual course of action, is keeping things relatively traditional and working to improve what already works best on PS4.
That's not to say PlayStation isn't doing anything new, especially with the UI allowing mid-game party joins and screen sharing between PS5 consoles. The "cards" system also has a lot of potential, assuming the support and effort is put in by third-party developers just as much as first-party games will support it. On the flip side, there are still some potential issues with PlayStation's UI that Xbox has both already solved, and is making even better with additional customization. Both consoles are toying with unique and interesting ideas, some of which are a bit more ambitious than others. Xbox in particular has more leeway to do so, where as PlayStation is largely trying to avoid replicating the PS4's UI issues. All of this is subject to change of course, but for now, each system is making a serious effort in improving the user experience.
The PS5 launches on November 13, 2020. The Xbox Series X/S launches on November 10, 2020.