What is DestinyQOL?

‘QOL’ is an acronym for ‘Quality of Life’.

In user interface and game design, QOL improvements refer to making often small changes that improve the user or player experience.

Attention is commonly put on frequently accessed activities and interfaces with a focus on discoverability, reducing complexity, and making things more intuitive.

Some examples of Destiny ‘QOL’ improvements over the years include:

• The ability to access the Vault from Orbit instead of needing to visit the Tower

• Fireteam Finder being added in-game

• Making Stasis and Aspects available for purchase at a vendor

Those QOL improvements, and many others, are often large and require substantial resources to envision, design, develop and test.

This site will explore smaller QOL efforts focused on improving the new player experience, and more specifically Destiny’s UX (“User Experience”), information design and interaction design.

Most of the (initial) proposed QOL improvements would be minor updates requiring limited resources. I’ve attempted, whenever possible, to leverage existing visual design elements, UX design patterns and technical capabilities already a part of Destiny 2 and/or used by third-party Destiny applications.

This blog is not (yet) focused on larger ‘big idea’ improvement — although I have a few ‘big ideas’ I might share down the road.

All of the suggested improvements are provided as inspiration to the Bungie team in hopes of helping improve engagement, reduce player population churn, reduce acquisition costs, increase player lifetime value and, ultimately, allow Bungie to provide the Destiny community with another 10 years of fun.

I have huge respect for the entire team at Bungie.

In terms of game design, IMHO, Bungie gets so many of the really big, really hard things very right.

While Destiny has had its ups and downs, getting the big things right is the reason Bungie has an engaged, passionate, and opinionated community wanting to see them succeed.

However, when a team remains so focused on improving a growing list of big, complicated systems, it can lose sight of all the smaller things that, when added up, negatively impacts the increasingly important and business critical new player experience.