What Xbox taught me about customer experience (and then forgot)

I worked for Xbox during the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii era.

Proper console wars.

I spent a lot of time on the road, visiting stores and showing staff the latest Microsoft products. Feature sheets, demos, the whole thing. My job was to help them understand why Xbox was the one to back, so it was the console they thought of when a customer asked for advice.

It was great.

One of its simplest selling points was also one of its strongest:

Put the game in. Start playing.

That was it.

At the time, the PlayStation 3 had a habit of making you wait. The disc went in, then the game installed from the disc, then there was often a big day-one update.

We used to laugh about it in the office.

“How does a games console get in the way of playing games?”

One hour and 20 minutes remaining

Years later, I bought a newer Xbox.

Now I’m the one sitting there, controller in hand, staring at an update bar when I’ve got 20 minutes spare between work, other commitments and toddler nap time.

1 HOUR 20 MINUTES REMAINING.

FFS. I just want to play Red Dead Redemption 2. Story mode. Offline. Why do I need the update?

I can accept that installing a game is normal now. It’s what happens afterwards that gets me.

Whenever I find a small window to play a single-player game, I switch on the console and discover another update that takes longer than the time I have. I never actually get to play the thing.

And the annoying bit isn’t only the wait. It’s that the original principle seems to have been forgotten along the way.

The product got more powerful, more connected and more capable.

But in that moment, the experience got worse.

I kept recommending Xbox long after I left

The job ended, but I didn’t stop being an advocate.

Years later, I was still the person talking about all the things Microsoft had considered for gamers. I’d recommend Xbox because I believed it had been designed around the people using it.

That’s what makes the change so frustrating.

Console gaming seems to have copied some of the inconvenient parts of PC gaming while losing one of the main reasons to own a console in the first place.

You could just sit down and play.

Nobody chose to make it worse

Nobody sits in a meeting and says, “Let’s make this more annoying for the customer.”

It happens a step at a time. A new requirement gets added. Then another feature, another dependency, another approval. Each one reasonable on its own. Together they get between the customer and the thing they came to do.

This is especially easy to miss in a scaling business. Sales improves its handover. Delivery adds a new approval. Finance needs more information. Customer service introduces another system. Every team can explain why its change was needed. Meanwhile, the journey gets longer, slower and harder to understand.

Complexity doesn’t disappear. Someone has to carry it. Too often, that person is the customer.

This doesn’t only happen with games consoles. It happens when signing up for a service takes six forms because every department needs slightly different information. It happens when a useful feature gets buried under a redesigned menu. It happens when a company makes its internal process easier by giving the customer another hoop to jump through.

The business sees the work it has completed.

The customer feels the extra effort.

Progress judged from inside the building can look brilliant. Progress judged from the sofa at 8:43pm, when you just wanted a quick game, can look like failure with better graphics.

Someone has to look at the whole thing

Each team is looking after its own part. The work gets signed off, the internal measure moves in the right direction. But nobody is protecting the whole experience.

That’s the bit I tend to step into.

When I map a business, I lay out the full journey: what the customer is trying to do, who owns each part, where the work changes hands, which tools are involved and where people are being made to wait.

One founder’s reaction after seeing their business mapped this way was: “I’ve never thought about my business this way. You’ve made it so clear.”

The problems were already there. Seeing the whole journey made them possible to fix.

Protect the original promise

The Xbox 360 experience understood the moment it was being used in. Someone had bought a game because they wanted to play it. The console’s job was to get out of the way.

That is still a useful standard for any product or service:

• What did the customer come here to do?
• What are we making them do before they can do it?
• Which steps exist for them, and which exist for us?
• What effort have we added as the business has grown?
• Who owns the whole journey, rather than one part of it?

That last question matters most.

If nobody owns the original promise, growth will gradually bury it under sensible decisions.

Good products respect the moment they’re used in.

If someone has 20 minutes to play and the console spends those 20 minutes preparing itself, it doesn’t matter how impressive the product looks on the roadmap.

It has forgotten the job it was bought to do.

Xbox didn’t lose the original promise in one decision. It got buried under a lot of sensible ones. Most businesses lose theirs the same way.

If yours has grown and the customer experience has become harder to explain, map it end to end. You may not find one obviously broken step - just a collection of sensible decisions nobody has looked at together.

That’s usually the cheapest place to start, and it’s where I’d start too.