Cursor vs Tradition Console Navigation (Destiny)

by kapowaz, Friday, August 22, 2014, 13:25 (3755 days ago) @ General Vagueness

Firstly, that would be a video I know is interesting. Secondly, I'll watch the dang video now, OK?

Watch the video — only the first few minutes really relate to the cursor UI and the inventory. A lot of the rest of it talks about iconography and overall aesthetics. Then near the end he talks about the map.

The more I think about it, the less I think the cursor UI is an inherently bad decision, but I do think it could be improved to solve some of the issues with inventory slot contexts that I talked about before. The thing is, these issues would affect a mouse-based interface just as much, and we have to tackle these kind of things in web interfaces too.

Here's some (simplified) JavaScript from a project I've been working on recently that does the same basic thing:

Basically, as soon as the mouse leaves the target element it triggers an event that starts a 1 second (1,000ms) timer — once that timer runs down, it executes the module.dismiss() function and hides the sub-navigation. But, if at any point during that 1,000ms the user mouses over the target element again it clears the timer, keeping the sub-navigation open. The net effect is you have a 1 second window in which to get back inside the sub-nav before it closes. Something like this would make a big difference to the inventory slots, I think — although naturally you'd need to tweak the timings to make sure it ‘felt’ right.