I Redesigned the ENTIRE Steam UI from Scratch
youtu.be
I've finally redesigned the entire Steam UI. This video focuses on the design choices rooted in much bigger causes, like marketing, development, etc. So get ...

I need it now.

I’m not a designer, but I can appreciate thoughtful explanations from passionate people, and I very much enjoyed watching her walk through her thought process.

Further, I find steam to be incredibly clunky, and I’d love to see them adopt her design.

  • verysoft@kbin.social
    7417·
    10 months ago

    No, that redesign is horrendous. It follows modern ‘design’ principles of putting as little information on the page as you can and that’s just a no go.

    Steam’s current UI isn’t bad at all, everything functions and is similar to previous versions allowing anyone to find their way around comfortably. There are some issues, like in the older workshop pages and there is absolutely a lot of QoL that could be made, but the main store, discovery and library are all totally functional and nice imo. Steam having a slightly different style on different pages isn’t actually a bad thing, at a glance you can easily tell what page you are on and makes it easier to find what you are looking for, whereas if it all looks the same, it’s not as simple as they all become too similar.

    Just because there isn’t a shit ton of padding, doesn’t mean it needs a redesign. Steam should definitely add skin support back though, for people who want to play around with it. I did personally use metro for the longest time.

    • Osa-Eris-Xero512@kbin.social
      555·
      10 months ago

      I stopped watching 3.5 minutes in when her ‘solution’ to the top level UI was to delete the downloads status button and half the other menus like ‘File’, you know where you exit the program and said ‘nobody uses’ all the store sorting tools. This should be used as a class for how to ruin your ux for the sake of a pretty ui

      • jard@sopuli.xyz
        182·
        10 months ago

        I mean, we can’t entirely discredit her effort. With her given design criteria for what is a “good user interface,” she nailed it out of the park. I would personally be inclined to use that UI if Steam went in that direction.

        However, designing for her specific design criteria is also the problem here. One of the golden, and frankly most obvious, rules of UX design is to design for users. You’re exactly right that she didn’t design for the needs of Steam users, but instead designed for her preconceived notion of what a user interface should look like. This would likely have turned out far better if she conducted research beforehand to see what Steam users actually want.

        • verysoft@kbin.social
          71·
          10 months ago

          They have some good quality of life suggestions in the video, but also a lot of horrible design decisions.

          I do like the idea of displaying the review ratios on games instead of “Mostly positive” etc. and the expanding info when you hover which moves the add to cart button is a problem Valve could fix. But that’s like the only takeaways, everything else was a downgrade, while I can see where they are coming from with their ideas… they are just not good UX. Their design is a case of wasting space and minimising the amount of stuff shown, they just outright remove useful information because ‘it exists elsewhere’. Just because it exists elsewhere doesn’t mean it can’t be somewhere else to be seen at a glance.

          They mostly looked at it from a design perspective and not a functionality perspective, they are new to Steam it seems from their profile shown in the video, so it makes sense they don’t really know what people want/expect from the application.

        • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.caEnglish
          33·
          10 months ago

          I think you’re making the classic mistake of “all users are like me”. I personally liked pretty much all of her proposed changes and agree with her that Steam’s current offering is a mess of disjointed design elements. I find the layout noisy, complicated, and hard to navigate, while her proposals all felt intuitive.

          • jard@sopuli.xyz
            82·
            10 months ago

            I never insinuated that my personal opinion was at all representative of Steam users as a whole. My point still stands that she probably should have asked a large body of Steam users to gauge their needs for the platform, so that she can incorporate their feedback into her redesign.

      • verysoft@kbin.social
        215·
        10 months ago

        That new generation design mentality, every webpage should have a max of 3 buttons, take up 50% of the page and the other half of the page can have 100 words maximum. Function over form please, every website is slowly devolving into this form over function bs the last 5-10 years. I think the UX designers all retired.