40 Days #15: Add more bounce to dashboard lists

Apart from the horizontal movement through the dashboard blades, navigating the Xbox 360 really comes down to scrolling up and down through lists. Lists of games, videos, movies. Lists of settings. Lists of songs from a PC. Lists of gamer profile options. And so on, and so forth.

In and of itself, this isn't so bad. The controller triggers can even be used for "page up/down" functionality to speed things up. There is just one thing that really annoys me when working with these endless lists. They don't always "bounce". At least that's what I imagine I have once seen it referred to as, although I can currently find absolutely no proof to back up my claim.

At any rate, I am talking about the UI feature of scrolling past the end of a list in either direction and immediately jumping to the other end of the list. This actually does work in some lists, for example the list of all games in the Game Store. In fact, it used to work in more places, but after the latest update which added more of the horizontal "twist" navigation (e.g. the content categories under the New Arrivals section), the lists within those twist sections no longer bounce. Some other lists - like the ones within the featured content islands in the Marketplace - sometimes bounce in one direction, but not the other, which is just bizarre.

Overall, the experience is awfully inconsistent, and you never really know if you can quickly skip between the top and bottom of a list. It's a small nitpick, but list bouncing is a user-friendly time-saving feature, which makes the dashboard UI much easier to use. As it stands now, unnecessary inconsistencies like this add more ammunition for the critics that say the Xbox 360 dashboard is already too complicated to use, especially for novice users.