There's a bias that I've been silently pondering for a few years: the user experience of video game consoles is so much worse than general consumer apps, but it's rarely mentioned.

My initial rationale was that the complexity of having a controller—with buttons and joysticks, instead of a cursor—made it more challenging.

I've spent a few months with both the Xbox Series X and the Playstation 5, agonising over the small details. And whilst I still think that the controller is a limiting factor, it's not the reason for this bias.

And importantly, you don't need to be passionate about either console to (hopefully) enjoy this—it's designed in a way to have clear UX takeaways that are relevant to general software design.

Let's jump right in:

Firstly, let me show you a good exercise to benchmark one product against another (useful for competitive research).

On the surface it looks too simple to be valuable, but having used this methodology for years—and over many industries—I can vouch for its effectiveness.

There's a bias that I've been silently pondering for a few years: the user experience of video game consoles is so much worse than general consumer apps, but it's rarely mentioned.

My initial rationale was that the complexity of having a controller—with buttons and joysticks, instead of a cursor—made it more challenging.

I've spent a few months with both the Xbox Series X and the Playstation 5, agonising over the small details. And whilst I still think that the controller is a limiting factor, it's not the reason for this bias.

And importantly, you don't need to be passionate about either console to (hopefully) enjoy this—it's designed in a way to have clear UX takeaways that are relevant to general software design.

Let's jump right in:

Firstly, let me show you a good exercise to benchmark one product against another (useful for competitive research).

On the surface it looks too simple to be valuable, but having used this methodology for years—and over many industries—I can vouch for its effectiveness.