Control Is in Your Hand
Ergonomics is the study of fitting equipment to the worker. Hardware developers take great pains to see how players hold and use the controller. This is the reason it never made any sense to me that a developer would create a control scheme that forced players to twist up their hands like pretzels. To help with this problem, I created this rule of thumb (BAA DUM! TISH!1) that I call the “Gamers’ Guide to Flex-O-Fingering.”
When you are designing controls, try establishing design rules for your control schemes based on hand placement (for example, in FPS games, it’s common to use the keyboard for character movement and the mouse for aiming and shooting). Not only is this approach helpful when determining what controls go where on the controller, but players will begin to associate muscle movement with a certain action even if they don’t realize they are doing it.
Speaking of keyboards, just because you have a whole keyboard available...