How do I clean up clutter from home screen and get my groups back?

..yet no fix in last update either....

bumpelibump

Thanks, Ezequiel.
Appreciate your reassurance. I very much hope you are right.

It would be great to hear anything about moves to restore these lost customisation tools to the Xbox Home Screen, as soon as possible.
Please let us know as soon as you hear anything!

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Further feedback for Microsoft/Xbox:

The current Xbox Home Screen is quite cumbersome and frustrating to use, for anyone who had been making substantial use of the available customisation options previously.
The Xbox Home Screen is now cumbersome and unpleasant to interact with, compared with the Home Screen experience we had previously.

The basic idea behind the new UI/Home Screen is good; there are definitely improvements, the work put into it has not been in vain.
However, the removal of useful customisation tools really lets the whole experience down.
People who had cleaned up unwanted features from their Home Screen and filled the lower part of the Home Screen with several (or many) of their own custom-arranged Groups have experienced a massive change with this UI update, and the change has been overwhelmingly negative, for these gamers.

There are so many things now on my Home Screen that I have no interest in seeing, or actively dislike seeing at all.
And, more importantly, there is now no option to relocate/remove these things.
I already know where to find the Xbox Store (if I didn't, I wouldn't need so much Home Screen space for displaying my curated game library).
I don't actually need the Xbox Store spilling all over my home screen.
That is quite off-putting and makes me less interested in exploring Game Pass or other new games at all.
(It doesn't matter how many times I am see an ad for a game that I don't like, I'm still not going to like it.
But, if I have to keep seeing it on my Home Screen, I will likely grow to hate it.)

If I am forced to have something unwelcome on my Home Screen, I am going to be negatively disposed towards it.
The Xbox Store, social media sites, other websites; these are all well understood to be commercial spaces, so we expect to encounter marketing in these spaces.
The Xbox Home Screen is a personal space.
When people dump stuff in your personal space that you don't want to have there, the natural reaction is obviously going to be negative.

I used to love my Xbox Home Screen, because I had it customised how I wanted it.
I have a large digital games library. This was something that Xbox apparently wanted me to have.
They encouraged me to buy many, many games. I played along.
They also gave me the ability to organise my digital library as I chose to, in Groups that I could display in pride-of-place on my Home Screen.
This is what I did. I made good use of the available customisation tools, to curate my Game Library for display on my Home Screen.
I had the full width of the screen to arrange my collection of games as I wished.
They looked great, arrayed across the screen, in front of my chosen background.
This was good.

From booting up and landing on my Home Screen, I could simply scroll down - no clicks, no buttons, no menus - and instantly be in the middle of my awesome Xbox Game Library, arranged neatly in my own Groups (in rows of e.g., different game trilogies, or genres, or just game-tiles that looked good together).
I could access all the games I wanted, quickly and easily - to quickly launch, to manage, or just to admire my collection, on my Home Screen.
This was a fantastic way to organise, view, and engage with a digital games collection.

Then, all those customisation tools got taken away.
The ability to curate and display a digital Game Library was taken away from Xbox gamers.

Now, what do I get when I scroll down on *my* Home Screen?
“Most played games”?!
They’re not my most-played games.
(Apart from Minecraft, I don’t play any of ‘em, and have no interest in doing so.
So, why do I have to have them in pride-of-place on my Xbox Home Screen?
Who actually benefits from this? Nobody benefits from this. So, why do it?)

Now, to access all my Groups, I have to dig through a bunch of menus.
Accessing my games is much less convenient now; and being used to having my library accessible directly from my Home Screen, this feels very, very cumbersome.

I can no longer arrange my game tiles on my Home Screen as I would like to see them displayed.
I want to display and interact with several Groups, but I can no longer do this on the Home Screen, so must now dig into the menus.
There, they're cramped into only a part of screen, sharing the space with other menu options.
They are now only displayed against a dull, grey background (which is good for menus, but it's no way to display a game collection).

They’re four-across in one available menu view, five-across in another.
So, there's no way to arrange game-tiles in our Groups to suit *both* those views, and to *also* suit the Home Screen (which was 7, now 8 game tiles across.
(Eight tiles across is actually a good thing, there - there has been that one, single improvement, IMO, with this UI Update).

Personally, I need space for 15-20 of my Groups on the Xbox Home Screen, at least.
Not 2.
2’s worse than useless.
That limitation only reminds me how much of my own Home Screen space has now been taken away.

Xbox wanted me to have a large digital game library.
I played along. I built up a sizeable collection.
I get that their focus is now moving to the Game Pass subscription model, but is this really good a reason to screw long-term fans over?
Is it actually a smart business move, to punish loyal, long-term Xbox gamers who are invested in and committed to the Xbox ecosystem?
By removing the tools these Xbox gamers had been using to display their hard-earned, meticulously-organised game libraries on their own Home Screens?
No; this is a really bad move. The anti-customer motivations behind it are infuriating.
Something useful to and valued by long-term Xbox gamers has been taken away from them.

The more loyal and long-standing an Xbox gamer has been, the more active a digital game collector they're likely to have been, and the more useful and valuable these tools are to them.
The removal of these useful features, and the subsequent frustration, is so unnecessary.
It should not have happened. This was a significant misstep.

But this can be fixed. This can be easily fixed, and it should be quickly fixed.

Xbox can restore these customisation tools to the Xbox Home Screen UI.
They can give their long-term, loyal gamers their own Xbox Home Screens back, to display their Xbox Game Libraries on their Xbox Home Screen as they like.

There doesn't need to be any loss of new features from the UI update that people are now enjoying, to do so.
There should be no impact to those now making use of the new Home Screen customisation tools at all.
This would simply be adding more options back in, for people to use or not use as they choose.

The new tools can stay, and the old tools can return - no-one misses out, no-one is penalised, everyone wins... and Xbox gamers will all be more empowered to create an Xbox Home Screen experience that they can once again enjoy.

These are our Xbox Consoles; these should be our Home Screens.
Just like the guy says on that 'Xbox On' video on YouTube from a couple of weeks ago.
(Right after some blatant misinformation about how Xbox isn't "just steamrolling all over your personal preferences", at around 01m50s.
With the removal of these customisation options and having irrelevant/unwelcome features forced into previously customisable Home Screen space, it sure feels like personal preferences have been well steamrolled.)

Right now, it feels like our Home Screen has been taken away from us.

Digital Game Collectors are still collectors.
Collectors want to display and interact with their collections.
We always have.

We are digital game collectors in large part because that is what Xbox wanted us to be.
We have played along with what they wanted for years - maybe Xbox could actually play along with what we’re wanting, now?

The beauty of being able to have your game library personally curated into 15-20 Groups arranged on your Home Screen is that you can actually enjoy it as a collection.
You can personalise your collection, arranging and displaying it across your whole screen as you wish.

Without the tools to display a game collection (which have recently been removed from the Xbox Dashboard), this fun part of the Xbox gaming hobby is greatly diminished.
(And the apparent purpose of this is to replace useful, desired features with non-optional, unwelcome ones. It doesn't feel great, Xbox.)
So, we'd just love to have the ability to fully clean up and customise our Home Screen returned to us.

If, however, the Xbox Marketing Team is truly adamant that the updated (abysmal and unwelcome) lower section of the Home Screen must remain in the (appalling) state that the recent update has inflicted upon Xbox gamers, then how about an alternative solution:

A sixth short-cut could be added to the existing five at the top of new Xbox Home Screen, to allow us to quickly access our own Home Screen display area.

This new shortcut could take Xbox gamers directly to their own separate Home Screen area.
Call it something like ‘My Wall’, 'My Display', or 'My Collection', or something.
(Perhaps just have one button the top of the screen, to return to the regular Home Screen view when/if you like.)

They could just provide us with a blank canvas there, to fill the whole screen with our own Groups of games, apps, Xbox friends, etc., as we wish.
(Maybe even add additional customisation controls, to user-select how many game-tiles across are displayed in this space, so that tiles don't get too small to be easily visible/legible? But, if not that, just give us the full screen-width for displaying app/game-tiles, seven or eight tiles across.)
Allow for 25, 30, 50 Groups to be displayed, organised, and interacted with, in that new space off the Home Screen.

This would not be quite as convenient as just scrolling down straight into our game library display like we used to do, but it would be much better than what we have now (having to click into menus and sub-menus, and having no way to arrange game-tiles to display consistently as we wish to view and interact with them - some Groups views show four tiles across; some show 5 across, but with a side-bar menu. The current Home Screen experience is just not as good as having the whole screen to display your Groups on, so let's go back to having something better available for gamers who want to use it).

With this solution, the Xbox Marketing team will still get to inflict the diarrhetic spillover from the Xbox Store all across the lower section of our Xbox Home Screens, as they apparently so vehemently desire to do.

But also; we long-term, loyal Xbox gamers would get back the freedom that we previously enjoyed - being able to arrange, display, manage and launch games from our Xbox Digital Game Libraries as we wish to.

By adding this improvement to the Xbox Home Screen, Xbox Marketing would be able to maintain the Xbox Home Screen in the new (IMO significantly downgraded) state, but also could perhaps appease all of us Xbox gamers who really dislike it intensely (or, at least, really dislike the fact that the new Home Screen has taken away useful and important customisation and display tools from us).

TL;DR -
Ideally, we’d like to just have the freedom to (almost) fully customise our entire Home Screen returned to us.

Give us back the Home Screen customisation options that we had prior to the recent Dashboard UI downgrade (e.g., to be able to re-order and/or remove unwanted/unwelcome features and promotions, and to just display our own carefully curated Groups of apps and games, as we choose to display them).

However, if we aren't going to ever be able to fully customise our Xbox Home Screen anymore, Xbox could now instead add a sixth short-cut at the top of the new Xbox Home Screen.

This proposed new Home Screen shortcut would take us directly to a 'blank canvas' Home Screen area which we can fully customise as we like, free from any marketing/promotional material. We'd have the full screen width available to arrange and display our Groups of game and app tiles as we wish them to be appear, against our chosen background.

This would provide a space where Xbox game collectors can display, interact with, and enjoy their digital game libraries, as they like. (Those libraries that Xbox has long encouraged loyal, long-term Xbox fans to build up over many profitable years.)

Everyone can actually win here, if Xbox really wants to be in this for the gamers - so, Microsoft/Xbox; how about it?

Can we get a win-win out of this?

But, if we can't get back the freedom to remove things that we don't want on our Home Screen from our Home Screen, and to display (at least) as many of our Groups in that Home Screen space as we could previously, instead of all that marketing guff... then I still would be happy enough to see an easily accessible, separate area made available for the display of a digital games collection in a full-screen, Home-Screen-like environment.

An ad-free space, with our custom backgrounds, but just where we can display our Groups of games, and re-arrange Groups and individual game tiles into the order we want to see them displayed. Like what we used to be able to do.
(Or, to just display all installed games there, if that's easier to deliver, and re-order the game tiles in our library as we'd like to display them.
Groups would be my preference, though.)

It just sucks digging through menus against a dull-grey background, where you can't arrange the game-tiles as you'd like to see them.
It'd be fine doing that, I guess; but we already had it so much better, until customisation options were taken away; and what we've lost is felt keenly.
(Groups would be able to display eight tiles across, on the Home Screen. But, that's only for two Groups, now.
So, most Groups are viewable as four tiles across in one menu, and five across in another; I think maybe six across in another view, still.
You can't arrange a Group so that game tiles line up as you want in three or four different arrangements!)
And, it's too easy to accidentally back out of a sub-menu and have to start digging through everything all over again from the top.
It's just a much slicker and more pleasant experience interacting with your Xbox game collection directly on the Home Screen.

It would be really cool, if they're not going to let us fully customise the Home Screen, to just provide a secondary Home Screen space for people who have accrued a large digital game collection.

(As it stands, the message from Microsoft/Xbox is clear:
"Hey! You spent a lot of money with us in the past! Well, ain't you special?!
So, anyway, we don't care about that now. Long-time, loyal fans can get bent, as far as we're concerned. Now, go subscribe to Game Pass."
Spoiler alert: I am currently not interested in subscribing to Game Pass.
You get back what you put out, Xbox, and you're giving me nothing with this Home Screen UI change.)

I don't see what Microsoft/Xbox hope to gain by taking valued/useful features away from loyal fans/gamers.
(Must be some complex '5D-Chess' strategy that I just can't expect to ever comprehend.)

I still really hate looking at the Xbox Home Screen now.
Weird, because it used to be a delight to behold, when it was my Home Screen.

If the goal was to provide a worse experience for Xbox gamers, then I have to give it to them:
Mission accomplished.

I agree the new dash is very cluttered, x-box more like ad-box, customisation is pivotal for a user system, if this cannot be done then customers leave or will never get the next release.

one of the many many reasons i prefer PC, endless customisation and have it the exact way I want.