My issues with the PlayStation 5's UI and UX
Ever since I got my PS5 in 2021, I’ve found myself constantly going back to my old PS4 instead. Each time I revisit the console, I’ve been feeling that I prefer using my old PS4 to the newer PS5, but so far I’ve been unable to pinpoint exactly why.
Instead of stressing about how to properly articulate my thoughts in a structured way, I’ve compiled some poorly organised ramblings about what I dislike about the PS5, and why I still use my PS4 instead.
At first I wasn’t that interested in getting a PS5. I’m not some “ultra hardcore elite pro gamer” who’s going out of their way to buy and play the newest games as soon as possible. For the majority of the PS4’s generation, I played almost nothing but Minecraft, Terraria, Overwatch, and Fortnite, and I was fine with that. The only reason I bought a PS5 was when it was announced that all PS4 games are playable on the newer console. I felt that “oh if I can play all of my current games while also having access to all the new games in the future, then I might as well upgrade to the PS5”.
For that purpose, the PS5 works perfectly fine. It can play all of my older games without issue, and I can also buy new PS5 games if I want. As for these newer PS5-only games, I’ve only played Helldivers 2 and Astro’s Playroom but they worked fine and I enjoyed them, no complaints there.
My real issues with the PS5 all come from the general User Experience. Even when all of my games are playable on PS5, the UX is what keeps me constantly going back to my PS4.
I have never been a fan of the PS5’s UI design. I even distinctly remember watching the UI reveal showcase and thinking to myself “this isn’t finalised… right?”. The UI is split into 2 sections, the Control Center and the Home Screen. I’ll start with talking about the Control Center first.
Control Center
The Control Center is essentially a rework of the PS4’s Quick Menu, but this time the entire UI is designed around this new ‘Cards’ gimmick. I don’t like these cards for the same reason I don’t like Windows 11’s default centred taskbar. Different types of Cards can come and go depending on a bunch of different situations. If you’re in a voice chat with someone, listening to music, have sessions you can join, etc, a new card for that appears on the Control Center. This means that the layout of the buttons is constantly moving around and shifting places, making it impossible to develop any sort of muscle memory when it comes to navigation.
Notice how the Cards have completely changed locations?
Cards can also include something called Activity Cards. They were advertised as a way to quickly jump to any part of the game straight from the Control Center or Home Screen rather than loading it normally. But most games don’t use these Activity Cards at all, and the ones that do don’t implement them well at all. Each time I’ve actually tried to use an Activity Card on a supported game, it doesn’t work properly and I get kicked back to the title screen anyways.
Not only are Cards very clunky and kinda useless, they’re often used to push ads directly to your Control Center. On PS5, you can ‘follow’ a game to recieve news for it in your Control Center. However, I find that most games either don’t use the news feature at all and the ones that do only use it to push ads for in-game microtransactions.
I ended up unfollowing every game just to get rid of the ads, only to find that sometimes Sony themselves will place ads that you cannot unfollow from. Here’s an ad for Concord that I couldn’t get rid of and was stuck on my screen every time I opened the Control Center for a few weeks.
imagine pushing an unavoidable ad directly to the screen of all PS5 owners and the game is still a complete finanical failure anyways lol
Home Screen
As for the Home Screen, I’m not a fan of the design either. At first glace it looks fine, quite appealing even, but the more I’ve used it the more I’ve grown to have lots of issues with it.
Games appear far too small on the dashboard for my liking, making them feel kind of insignificant in a way. I wonder if this was on purpose? Seeing as the button to buy an in-game add-on is 2x larger than the button to actually open the game, it feels like its designed in a way where the add-on is supposed to be more attention grabbing than anything else on the screen.
The PlayStation Store was also incorperated directly into the UI, rather than being a seperate app. This sounded cool to me at first (especially with how slow the store is on PS4) until I realised it’s just a way for Sony to put these ads for microtransactions directly onto the dashboard for your games, and also let you impuslively buy them without having to manually navigate to the PS Store app and wait for it to load.
Custom themes are sadly gone too. I saw a lot of people defending this by saying that “custom backgrounds can’t work on PS5”, as the background is set to the cover art of the game you’re currently looking at. But the PSP and PS3 both had game-specific backgrounds and allowed custom backgrounds at the same time, so I find that point to be irrelevant.
Imagine if everybody had to use the default wallpaper on their phone, or their PC, etc. Wouldn’t that just be boring? Don’t you want to personalise your phone, even just a iittle bit? If I wanted to be cynical, I could say it’s to allow developers to put full screen ads on the dashboards for their games. I mean there’s already cases of that being done already.
Cards and Activities are also incoperated into the home screen, and once again they’re pretty poorly implemented. Zenless Zone Zero would tell me to join the multiplayer lobbies of my friends (the game didn’t have multiplayer yet), Modern Warfare Remastered would tell me to join multiplayer sessions that were already full, and Modern Warfare II somehow got stuck on telling that I was 66% through a campaign mission even after I had finished the entire game.
Activities can also change the background image and more often than not it’s just an in game screenshot. There was even one time where Overwatch 2 managed to push a temporary placeholder asset out as the game’s background.
Yes, these issues might be the fault the fault of the games and not Sony, but it still negatively impacts the user experience when the main home screen of the console is constantly dislaying incorrect progress information, advertisements, or telling you to join multiplayer sessions that are already full.
Another issue I have with both the Control Center and the Home Screen as a whole is how extremely DARK everything is. There’s no colour to anything, everything is either black or grey and there’s also a darkness vingette filter applied to everything too. It just feels dark and depressing, I miss the animated waves of the default PS3/4 themes, or the various custom themes you could install.
Welcome Hub
In North America, there used to be a tab called ‘Explore’ which was basically just a screen for showing ads. As a European I never saw the Explore page on my own console, and I was actually kind of glad we didn’t get it because I didn’t want more ads on the home screen.
In 2024, Sony replaced Explore with the ‘Welcome Hub’ and this is easily, without contest, my favourite PS5 feature. The Welcome Hub is a customisable screen that’s always on your dashboard and appears first when you turn the PS5 on.
You can set a custom background image, and choose from various informational widgets to display. I personally have mine laid out in such a way that I can see my progress in whatever game I’m playing at the moment, a rotating gallery of all the pictures I’ve taken, and what my friends have been up to.
It’s just really nice to be able to customise things again. Anything that helps breathe life into an otherwise very dark and lifeless interface is very appreciated in my eyes. It makes my console feel a lot more personalised to me and i really love this feature, even if it took over 4 years to get here.
Conclusion
For the average person, the PS5 is likely a direct upgrade that invalidates any reason to own a PS4. Being able to buy all new PS5 games alongside the ability play all of your older PS4 games, some even being patched to run better on PS5, is more than likely enough reason for most people. However, as someone who’s not personally too concerned with new games, I would just rather stick to my PS4.
In my eyes, the PS5’s interface is designed more around boosting PlayStation Store sales and a gimmicky new ‘Cards’ system than it is designed around being practical to use. The console is certainly nice for more demanding games such as when my friends want to play Fortnite with me. I will always use my PS5 because having a higher, more stable framerate is a tangible competitive advantage. But when the majority of the games I play don’t recieve any benefits from being played on PS5, I’d rather stay where I find a more pleasant user experience, which is on PS4.