Hi everyone!

For those of you in the Xbox Public Preview program, you can now start enjoying background audio from Groove while playing your favorite games. Just search for “Groove” in the store, and install the first app that shows up (the old app should appear second in the list ).

However, that’s not why I’m posting here today. We wanted to let the Groove faithful get a little glimpse into the development process as we worked to bring the universal app from Windows devices to Xbox One. The first thing we did was to install the app in both phone and desktop mode. We learned (unsurprisingly) that starting with desktop mode would work much better for most pages while on the console, but it was still pretty messy.

That first week, we dealt saw a variety of problems that needed to be fixed before we could even think about sending this out to our Preview customers:

The app didn’t account for TV safe zones , so a lot of text and images were cut off by the edges of the screen.

The app assumed the user had mouse/touch, so navigating with a controller could get weird. Some elements on the screen looked like they would be easy to get to (just press right) but turned out to be much harder (press down, down, right, right, right, right, right, right, up).

Scaling from PC up to console was a bit too large. We didn’t want the density quite as high as on the PC, but showing 2-3 playlists per row was a little too huge.

The increased scaling meant that text and other elements were overlapping, and as you scrolled down the page, the header may end up on top of your albums.

Dismissing dialogs with X is a weird experience with a controller, but quite natural with touch or a mouse. We looked to minimize those interactions.

The now playing bar that is on the bottom of the app and very useful on PC and Phone caused problems on the console. It overlapped with other content, made it hard to scroll long lists, and took up precious screen real estate.

Groove Music was built for Mobile first, for performance. This meant many of default states of our tiles, pages, layouts other UI were falling back to a mobile-centric design since we were introducing a new device type.

In addition to working on solving the user interface problems and the technical issues that arose on a new platform, we also were one of the first Universal Windows Apps (UWAs) on Xbox One, and the very first to “flight” to Xbox through the Store. As a guinea pig, we had to help iron out some of the quirks in the system, but have helped to pave the way for the hundreds, or even thousands, of first and third party apps that will want to join us on Xbox One.

We hope you enjoy using the new Groove Music app on Xbox One and look forward to your feedback. Thanks!