You must log in or # to comment.
i know im silly for this but this is part of steam’s charm for me. i like that it just feels genuine like steam isn’t trying to lull you with all the tried and true marketing and UI best practices. it feels very practical, like using old windows 9X UIs.
Wow. This comments section reads like 50 various versions of Colin Robinson, all swarming on this very post. Every single one of them finding a way to be more pedantic or curmudgeonly than the other.
Well, how else would the energy vampire recharge? Huh? Random Internet person?! HOW?!¿¡
Wait till you discover windows ui. Fucking backup tool having advanced options that display 2 of the 3 options and you have to click more to see the third option. and then you realize the advanced options are the basic options. Absolute clown os.
As someone with crazy UI old, steam is not at the top of my list of problematic programs (Looking at everything epic has made. Seriously opening unreal engine is like a flashbang of what does this button even do?)
But honestly, steam is easy to understand, the worst page is scrolling though games with its weird scrolling mechanic in the categories section.
Counterpoint: I can identify which part of the UI most of those come from. This level of variety between various UI functions is actually good. I don’t want the interface tabs or the settings tabs to be confused with tabs in the store, even though they are all tabs. I don’t want buttons to all look the same, especially not the huge purchase button. But even accepting that as an outlier I want some buttons to be clearly part of the steam UI and some as part of the site page I am on, so I don’t get confused.
probably boosts user performance for users who have more experience like you but slightly hinders new users who haven’t got the hang of it yet
if steam prioritizing retention of growing userbase is one of its goals, it’s not a bad strategy in my opinion
Bring back steam skins.
Me mad.
And i hope it never changes. It works. Don’t touch it!
There’s also some stupid UX choices that show they simply don’t give a fuck. On the Steam Deck when you want to update something and you don’t have enough space it simply says “not enough free space”. What use is that to me? Tell me how much you need!
Tell me how much you need!
More.
Miraculously still better than GOG Galaxy…
I click library. I am taken to downloads. Silly me.
Your lack of sorting makes it look worse than it is.
Just looking at the buttons, they clearly have design documents, green is only used on buttons dealing with money.
Blue buttons primarily deals with social interactions or midrange store tasks
Grey buttons are for the local client
That would be 3 buttons not 40 like in the picture
No?
I only mention colors, not styles.
Lol, must be a headache for the devs maintaining it, but from the end user perspective it is way more pleasant of an experience than epic, origin, gog, ubi and whatever else is out there.
I have never noticed this. Shows how the average consumer doesn’t really care about consistent design languages.
Given Valve’s history of taking play testing really seriously, I wonder if this is something they’ve realized through user testing?
Maybe there’s some advantage even because for the ones I’ve used a lot i know at a glance which part of steam they’re in, which wouldn’t be as easy if the only difference was the text. And each part of steam is usually internally consistent, at least mostly.
I prefer it to most ui these days, tbh. Everything is either hypergeometric and boring, or forces mobile website design into desktop use for no good reason.
Flat design overdone like today is horrid
It certainly has character!
Steam does just that though, it’s design is shit for desktop.
Short of one window with multiple columns functioning as one long list of your games I fail to see how you want steam to act even more like a desktop application UI wise.
I have no trouble using it in spite of this.
I think it’s actually very nice for the different areas of the program to have a distinct visual identity.
Imagine making the same type of image about your own furniture. A mish mash of a bunch of different items and styles, but when you put everything together it just looks like home
Yeah, in spite of it.
I’m a UX/UI designer. The point of a good user experience design is to make it intuitive. Every button has the same shape and font so you know it’s a button. The colors are consistent across primary and secondary buttons so you know which is the primary action. All the elements are consistent so you know what to expect and where to click, so it’s intuitive.
You have no trouble using it because you’ve learned where everything is. If you were using it for the first time, or wanted to find some new feature, you would have to click around and learn by trial and error. That’s a bad user experience.
I genuinely don’t care about the buttons not looking the same. I have real complaints though. Primarily that if I’m looking at downloads, go to the store, then click library I see downloads again instead.
Right? The nerd who looks at steam on their phone and then on their desktop and rages about the UI… Like dude, chill.
The UX in UX/UI stands for User Experience and it’s great.
