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.
I watched it a while ago and while I was not on board with all the changes to the store she completely lost me with the changes to the UI outside the store.
Leave the download bar right where it is, also leave the friend list where it is. Multi monitor people actually use that stuff.
Also don’t touch the god damn library. It’s fine, good even. Not sure what she’s on about a easy “Play” button for recent games missing, it’s right there in the Library home page.
Valve needs to hire this person, my god. Love that they seem to really understand what users do with steam instead of just looking at it from miles away, removing every feature + calling it a redesign.
Steam’s UI has long been the worst part of using Steam for me, to the point that I actively avoid using any steam features I don’t have to. While they’ve made small parts of it prettier over time, figuring out how to do anything you haven’t done before is difficult, there’s clutter all over that makes information like reviews harder to scan, and to top it all off, every single page has a different UI I have to figure out.
Been using Steam since its debut and while I don’t like 100% of this, good lord it’s nice seeing someone actually trying.
I would absolutely love this as a starting point.
For all Gaben’s MS/Windows angst, its long term bloat and mishmash of design language/features (he’s not wrong), this really does illustrate the need for Gaben to get his house in order.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
All in all? I don’t like it. Looks like a template taken from Soulless MoneyGrab Inc. but with some added steam elements.
Change and innovation is not bad, but while perhaps not especially beautifully, the current user interface is pretty decent in the storm that is nowadays “looks over function”-mentality.
Edit: but as others have said, it would be nice if there was some kind of theme selector so people can make their own choices, or just fine tune Big Picture mode as it already follows a more simplified and stylished theme.
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