Having had a while now to live with the December 2011 Xbox dashboard update, which brought many new features such as deep Kinect integration, Bing voice search, on demand streaming TV services, YouTube and more, as well as an entirely different interface, I have been generally impressed with it. However, Microsoft sold the update as making the Xbox the digital media centre hub of the future for people's living rooms. It has fallen somewhat short of that promise, in the UK at least, and here are some tweaks that I think could improve the user experience and, possibly, move it closer to achieving that goal.

• Customisation: Currently there is no way to move panels around, or decide which one, such as 'tv' or 'games' to make the default. So, everybody has the same layout, whether they use their Xbox mainly for gaming or watching streamed movies or whatever. It would be much more user friendly if this could be customised to a user's preferences, much like the start menu of a computer.
• Shortcuts: Following on from the customisation idea, why not have a 'favourites' panel that can be filled with shortcuts to favourite games, apps, saved searches etc.
• Search across all apps: Bing search on the Xbox works well, particularly with Kinect voice control, but it does not search everything. Content from some apps is searchable, while some is not. This may get better as apps are updated and search is further integrated, but, at the moment, search is less than all encompassing. The lack of search for TV, music and pictures from a connected Media Center PC is a glaring omission. I'm not sure if this will ever be implemented, as Microsoft seem to be going cold on the whole Media Center concept, but it would be great if it was. Indeed it was one the features on my wishlist for the update.
• Media Center as a TV option: Currently, in the UK anyway, the only live TV option is Sky. Microsoft have not included Media Center, which supports many kinds of TV tuners. It would also be an excellent way to promote sales of new Windows 7 PCs.
• Download option in streaming apps: While the new on demand streaming media apps on Xbox, such as 4oD, are generally very good and the picture quality is adequate, it would be nice to have a download option as well as a stream option, as Zune movies do. This would enable higher quality files and also make the apps usable for people with slower internet connections for whom streaming is just not possible.
• The apps concept: Apps are everywhere these days and now they have arrived on Xbox. However, they do make the Xbox experience a bit disjointed. You have to open up an app and look around to see if there is anything you want. Bing gives the promise of a unified search but, until all media in all apps can be searched, it is not there yet. Maybe a summary overview tab of what is available across all apps would make the whole experience more joined up. At the moment it just feels, well.. bitty.
• Media accounts: To access all the new features of Xbox you will need an Xbox Live Gold account. In a living room TV scenario though, whose account do you use? With personalised gamer profiles, YouTube accounts and so many social media services hooking into the Xbox experience this can be a problem on a shared Xbox. You wouldn't want your kids accidentally, or not, posting to your Twitter account or spending your Microsoft points. Also, you would want anybody to be able to view movies you have bought from a service such as Blinkbox without having to be logged in as you on the Xbox. What is required is a generic family or group account that can be shared amongst several people. It could even be a specific 'Xbox Live Media' account, that only gives access to services such as Zune and LoveFilm but is not tied to any gamer or social media profile and cannot access online gaming etc. Media accounts could even be bundled free with a family account pack or included with certain Xbox packages.