"Pointing hand" cursor over buttons/sliders are aginst common UI design principles

In 25w35a, a new option was introduced that changes how mouse cursor reacts to the selected content.

The change by itself is fine (and even very welcomed), with the exception on two points that goes against commonly acknowledged UI design principles and guidelines.

Firstly, the “pointing hand” cursor is used over buttons and sliders. This design choice is going against common UI design principles that prevails over the good conception of those interfaces and their usage. The “pointing hand“ cursor shall only be used for pointing hyperlinks and URLs, which is their only intended purpose.

Those guidelines are commonly dictated by Microsoft, Apple, the Mozilla Foundation, the W3C and many other instances in which their design principles are commonly followed by developers around the world. The harmonized perception of these principles allows each devices to be used without major difficulties as actions and cursor behaviors are universal. Going against these common principles can lead to a diminished ease-of-access across devices as the behavior is not “standardized”.

As per those principles, it is worth asking whether the changes at these two points in snapshot 25w35a does represents a gain or a regression of the end user’s ease of use of the game’s user interface.

Secondly, as I “pointed out” this “standardization” issue (fun pun, isn’t it?), it is up to me to submit some suggestions to address the problem in the most transparent way, taking account of the pros and cons of each situation.

• For the sliders, the solution seems to be rather simple: despite not completely fit the description it is generally allocated to it, the “grasping hand” cursors are a more logical choice when it comes to the action of grabbing the slider’s handle then moving it in one or other direction to change the setting, like someone would to with a physical volume slider for example.

• For the buttons themselves, it is indeed that some people simply prefers the old behavior while others already set their preference to the new behavior introduced with snapshot 25w35a. The solution would be to opt for an hybrid solution that can please the two visions. As this change is mainly motivated by the accessibility in mind, maybe having the regular cursor as the default to comply with the UI design principles, then having an accessibility option to use the “pointing hand” cursor as an alternative for people that really need it, would be a decent compromise to solve that problem. As some accessibility options are displayed on first launch, maybe this option should be included there for a better ease-of-access.

These are two solution that have the advantages of being not very restricting over the initial choices while keeping the best of both worlds, to satisfy both parties transparently.