Behind the Design: Xbox Controller
By: Joline Tang
Tags: Industrial Design, Hardware, Design, Games, Microsoft

And as a gamer himself, Ryan really wanted our golden hands — gamers who understand the nuances of the controller better than most — to feel at home when using the standard controller, too. “We wanted the heights, edges, and angles to be finely tuned to provide a performance boost across a wide range of personal playstyles and game genres,” he elaborates.

The final D-pad is a slightly deeper dish, which gives your thumb a nice little “home” to sit in and the angles are finely tuned to give you a good amount of leverage with minimal movement. “It combines the crisp precision and tactile feedback of the standard cross with easier access to diagonals and sweeps from the faceted dish,” beams Ryan. (BTW, it was one of his favorite parts of the new design. 🤫)

An outside-in design approach

In some games, a split-second delay in tapping a button could be the difference between making the leap to the moving platform or defending yourself from an enemy’s blow. And if the controller is just a smidge too big for your fingers to hit the right button in time, it’s game over.

While the design team took an inside-out approach to the console, the controller was designed from the outside in, including the handfeel of the surface, the force of each button, and perhaps most importantly, how the hand hugs the form.

Size comparison of hand sizes in the 95th, 5th, and 3rd percentiles.

Building on the success of the Adaptive Controller, the team was intent on designing to include more people with the new wireless controller. To help more people play comfortably, they extended the hand size range down to the 3rd percentile (previous generations targeted the 5th to 95th percentile), which represents tens of millions of people across the world.

Originally, they tried decreasing the overall size by 2–5%, but “we quickly learned that what we couldn’t do is just shrink the controller,” Ryan recalls, “ because it threw the controls out of alignment with good ergonomic principles.”

So following the 80/20 rule, they started examining the 20 percent that could be trimmed down and began rounding bumpers, shaving down parts of the triggers, and re-sculpting the grips.

And then came the user testing. The team invited players from different backgrounds and with varying abilities to test prototypes and pre-production units. There are very few products people hold steadily for hours at a time, so the team wanted to know which prototypes felt comfortable for an extended period and how the new design impacted performance. “We wanted to know things like how fingers slid on certain areas and how the matte finish felt with their grips,” Erika explains.

The team observed how matte surfaces helped our customers maintain the same glide and slide throughout gameplay, so they applied it to the D-pad, bumpers and triggers. They also noticed how the tactile dot patterns on the triggers and bumpers broke up the surface tension of gamers’ hands, which reduces heat and sweat to improve the feel and performance, and implemented that too. “We really focused on small iterations that made sizable performance improvements on the last generation,” Erika explains.

Microbumps on the trigger and bumper to help with grip.

The new controller weighs the same as previous generations, but the final sculpt of the handles encourages your hands to hug the front part more, which tilts the controller more toward your palms and creates a “it-just-wants-to-stick-to-my-hands” feeling (real quote).

These almost indiscernible changes preserve the recognizable silhouette while making our newest Xbox wireless controller the most universal and inclusive one ever.

Pics or it didn’t happen

Capturing and sharing moments have become part and parcel of our modern lives and it’s perhaps even more deeply ingrained in gaming culture. And with gamers already asking for an easier capture and share experience, the new sculpt of the controller created the right opportunity to add a share button.

“All of the buttons have been on the controller since the beginning, so to add a new button is a very deliberate decision for Xbox,” explains Ryan. “We wanted to make sure the why behind adding the button was an integral part of how people play games today.”

The team held early discussions about whether the share feature should be tapping a combination of buttons, but they wanted it to be quick and unobtrusive without UI popping up or jumping through menus while you’re playing. The smoothest way to accomplish this was with a physical button. Now, sharing those pics and clips is as quick and as familiar as sending a text or posting to social media.

The new share button on the latest Xbox wireless controller.

Just as the consoles needed to live in harmony with its surroundings, the controller needed to feel like it was part of you, not another piece of hardware to wrangle. Because at the end of the day, it’s about the game. People want to experience the stories, be the character, do things that they can’t normally do, and as the industry moves into even more immersive gameplay scenarios with next generation consoles, the controller needs to keep up.

“I’ve played video games since I was six-years-old,” shares Ryan, “so it’s been an immense privilege to be part of the team responsible for taking input from gamers across the world and evolve such a beloved controller.”