Cursor vs Tradition Console Navigation (Destiny)

by Mars , Portland, OR, Thursday, August 21, 2014, 11:19 (3541 days ago) @ General Vagueness

I've been super conflicted on the idea. At first I hated the idea of having a cursor on a console, but after a while it felt pretty fluid and easier than trying to navigate menus through only navigating Up, Down, Left, & Right. It allows for more fluid movement between navigation items in the menu especially when the cursor is pretty large and each button's target area (like weapon selection, for example). They had a lot of options in the character menu that getting from Point A to Point B is easier using a cursor than navigating through several different items before getting to Point B.

Although it does become a bit more annoying in menu screens like the Orbit Menu when there are only a few buttons and they're spread out a bit further in between. It might have been interesting to have the current cursor navigation controlled by the thumbsticks while the D-Pad controlled more traditional console-style of selection. If that were possible, it would make things feel super fluid for users who know what they're doing.

Bungie's UI team must have had a lot of explorations on how best to do the menu navigation. When it comes down to it, the trade off of using a cursor vs traditional console-style navigation must have been enough for them to choose cursor based navigation.

This video might give you a good idea on the reasoning behind some of the UI decisions that were made.