Where do I go? Navigation, menus and wayfinding

The menu tree: breadth beats depth

The most common structural mistake in game menus is depth. Options inside categories inside tabs inside a settings screen, each level added by someone reasonable, each one adding a place for something to hide.

• Aim for three levels at most. Root, section, detail. Anything deeper needs a reason.
• Widen rather than deepen. Eight visible items beat three items that each contain three more, because scanning is faster than exploring.
• Every screen should say where it is. A title and a route back. Players dropped into a subscreen by a notification need to know what they are looking at.
• Do not hide frequent actions inside rare ones. If players change loadout every session and graphics settings twice a year, those should not be siblings at the same depth.
• Count the presses to the five things players do most. If any of them is more than three, restructure around that.

Name screens by what the player wants

Menu labels tend to inherit the names the team uses internally, which are the names of systems rather than the names of intentions.

The test is what players call it out loud in a playtest. If five people say inventory and your button says stash, the button is wrong, however precise stash is in your fiction. Watching for that vocabulary gap is one of the things a playtest is for.

The back button contract

Back is a promise: it returns you to where you just were, every time, from everywhere. Games break it constantly, usually because different screens were built by different people at different times.

1. One back, one meaning. Back goes up or out. It never confirms, never applies, never quits without asking.
2. Close and back are different. A modal closes and returns to what was underneath. Back navigates the tree. Using one control for both makes deep screens unpredictable.
3. The controller button is the same everywhere. Bound to a cancel action, glyph shown in the prompt bar, per the rules in designing game UI for controllers.
4. Escape and the platform back gesture must both work, on the platforms that have them, and must agree with your on-screen control.
5. Unsaved changes get one dialog, worded so the buttons say what they do rather than Yes and No, which is a UX writing problem.
6. Back from the root exits deliberately. With a confirmation, and never as a surprise.

Wayfinding: the other half of lost

The second navigation problem happens in the world, and it is solved mostly with level design and light rather than with interface. Interface should be the last resort, not the first.

• Landmarks first. A tall, distinctive, visible-from-far thing orients players better than any compass. Give each area one.
• Sightlines do the instructing. If the player can see the destination from the entrance, most of your wayfinding is already done.
• Light leads. Players walk towards brightness, warmth and movement. This is the oldest trick in level design and it still works.
• Contrast marks the path. The route should differ from the scenery in value or colour, consistently, across the whole game.
• Consistency is the rule that makes the others work. If yellow paint means climbable in level one, it means climbable in level nine, and nothing else is yellow.
• Dead ends should look like dead ends from a distance, so exploring them is a choice rather than a punishment.

Objective tracking: how much to tell

This is a design decision disguised as an interface one, and it sits on a spectrum between the player never being lost and the player never exploring.

Whichever you pick, let players turn it up or down. A marker toggle costs a day and turns a divisive design decision into a preference, in the same way the settings in game UI accessibility do.

Maps that work

• Orientation must be obvious. Either the map rotates with the player or it does not, and it never changes its mind. If it is fixed to north, mark north unmistakably.
• Show where the player is looking, not only where they are standing. A cone beats a dot.
• Filters, not clutter. Once a map has forty icon types, the useful ones are invisible. Let players switch categories off, and remember the choice.
• Player markers are worth ten features. Letting people mark their own point of interest solves a hundred navigation problems you did not anticipate.
• Legends must be reachable while reading the map, not on another screen.
• Fast travel needs to be findable from the map, because that is where players are when they decide to use it.
• Zoom and pan on a controller need a plan, since this is one of the screens that assumes a mouse, as covered in designing game UI for controllers.

What a lost player looks like

In a playtest, being lost has a recognisable shape, and it appears long before the player says anything.

1. Backtracking. Walking the same corridor twice in opposite directions.
2. Perimeter running. Following the edge of a space looking for an exit.
3. Camera sweeping. Spinning the view in place rather than moving.
4. Menu diving. Opening the map, then the quest log, then the map again.
5. Trying the wrong door repeatedly. They believe it should open; your affordances told them so.
6. Going quiet. Players narrate while they are engaged and stop when they are frustrated.

Affordances: why they cannot see the door

When several players miss the same interactive object, the object is not the problem, the language is. Games teach players what is interactive within a few minutes, and everything after that has to obey the lesson.

• Interactables need one consistent signal across the whole game: an outline, a colour, a light, a shape. Two signals means two categories, and players will look for the difference.
• Do not decorate with your interaction language. If glowing means usable, nothing decorative glows.
• Movement attracts the eye more than anything else, so a subtle animation is often all a missable object needs.
• Prompts appear at the range where the action becomes possible, not earlier, which teaches distance as well as availability.
• Check it in a still frame. Screenshot a room and ask someone which things they can use. That is your affordance test.

A player who is lost does not blame your level. They blame themselves, get bored, and stop playing.

A navigation audit

1. List the five things players do most. Count the presses to each from the main menu.
2. Draw your menu tree on one page. Anything more than three levels deep, justify or flatten.
3. Read every screen name out loud. Would a player use those words?
4. Press back from every screen in the game and check where you land.
5. Open a modal from a subscreen and check back and close behave differently and correctly.
6. Load your largest level and stand at the entrance. Can you see where to go?
7. Turn off the objective marker and play a mission. Is it still possible?
8. Screenshot three rooms and ask someone which objects are interactive.
9. Open the map. Time how long it takes to answer "where am I facing?"
10. Watch one playtest recording at double speed and count the backtracks.