The latest Xbox One system update brings your console closer to Microsoft's vision for a unified Xbox experience, and closer to what Xbox Series X will look like come November.
The update for all Xbox One owners refreshes several areas of the console's interface with a revised look and feel. The in-game guide is easier to read, with a layout that helps you swap between recent activities, the dashboard, and other games and apps. You can change the order of the Guide tabs, and new buttons are at the bottom of the page to quickly see your notifications, adjust your audio settings, or handle other common tasks.
The notifications themselves have been adjusted as well, combining all alerts, game invites, and message notifications into a single inbox. You can access this straight from the guide, though it will also bundle in updates from all Xbox apps and automatically update their read status across platforms.
The Parties and Chat interfaces were combined back in June, and further refinements now let you see a message text preview or individually adjust volume controls for each member of your party (for that one friend who just won't take the mic out of their mouth). The activity feed got a fresh pass as well, with a single size for all posts, less meta-text to distract from the media, and more shortcuts to automatically access the people and games associated with each post.
If you're an Xbox Insider, you'll also be able to test out a visual update to the Xbox One interface, try out new Profile Themes that include selections from first-party games, and sign in with the same account simultaneously across multiple devices. You'll still only be able to play games on one device at a time, but it should make sharing consoles in a household more easy.
Xbox got a new Microsoft Store interface that makes it twice as fast earlier this month, and that's just the start.
