At the end of an activity, players receive shiny new loot in return for accomplishing various feats of heroism. With bounties (mini objectives), however, it involved a multi-step, multi-screen process that could often feel tedious and time-consuming, outweighing the benefits of reaping bounty rewards.

A new take on bounties and patrol objectives for The Final Shape expansion, Pathfinder seeks to refresh objective and reward pursuits for a unique destination, The Pale Heart, and to three ritual activities: Gambit Co-op, PvP Crucible, and Vanguard Strikes.
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How Pathfinder hoped to achieve its goals was to replace bounties and patrols with a new system that motivated players to engage with destination activities, with satisfactory results that make their journey feel worthwhile each time.

The end result, while borrowing and reusing patterns from existing systems, was a new interface and system which included path creation, traversal between objective nodes, and tiered objective placement and access.

For quality of life and ease of use features, we included passive tracking alongside marked tracking to make progress flexible, and a control shortcut to open the screen (versus using the cursor to toggle a much larger destination map).

In the first few weeks of release, we found that engagement was at fairly low numbers, and not increasing.

We realized players were not only having trouble finding Pathfinder access in rituals activities, but felt even more restricted than they previously did with bounties. Each ritual activity shared a Pathfinder with each other, meaning three activity types were stretched across one Pathfinder screen. This set up significantly reduced player choice between the three activities, as some players favored PvE (player vs. environment) over PvP (player vs. player), and left little room for them to navigate and complete a Pathfinder card.

The solutions can be read in more detail under Mitigating Issues.

The process to reach, select, and start bounty activities is a multi-step process (unless of course you have the Destiny 2 app) that involves back and forth quick travel and screen navigation.

In this sample, I'm going to pick up some bounties from a Vendor named Banshee, who presides at the main social hub, the Tower; then start a Vanguard strike activity: 

During the bounties (and to a smaller degree, patrols) process, a few key problems arose: 

With stakeholder direction, we sought to introduce both a new system and an interface that falls in line with Destiny 2's branding of science fiction, magic, and fantasy.

Before jumping into any visuals or what the system itself would look like, we first needed to set out a few guidelines on helping player engagement and navigation.

While the process for designing, building, and implementing Pathfinder was no easy task for the areas involved, it was still a process that went relatively smoothly with clean handoffs. The reasons for this were grounded fairly early in the process, leading to a strong foundation of knowledge and alignment for multiple teams: 

Our visual designer was able to work parallel with us as we were building the feature’s foundations. Because they were well-informed of our iterations and thought processes, they could create and share their vision for a final visual pass during each iteration, and make quick changes as the feature changed.

As player flows, informational displays, and visual passes were being iterated on closely, this allowed our technical UX designer to build out an efficient system for curved path creation and interactions, which was a new system in Destiny 2. Because of their efforts, any technical constraints or issues were quickly identified and confirmed that it was both a visually and technically feasible proposal to implement.

Although these were a small example of how the work went, they led to smoother handoffs and solid material for internal and external testing.

After a few weeks out in the wild, we received feedback that finding the Pathfinder node for the three rituals activities was confusing; and even more concerning, players were feeling dissatisfied with the way all three activities shared one Pathfinder screen, and significantly restricted their path choices.