Steam revamped its UI, it's still not consistent but some elements in this picture are no more
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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This is one of those big “Oh no! Anyways…” kinda moments.
Like someone at Epic or Microsoft or something was like “but Steam’s graphics aren’t as good as our graphics!”
… and?
It's called working software sweaty, you get some design inconsistencies when you focus on creating new stuff led by the development team instead of the human personification of Helvetica
I always get sweaty when working software.
it's summer, take off the "programming socks"
Nah, they're medically necessary.
Incoporating multiple styles sounds like more work than it's worth. Can we talk about tech debt?
U can make any ui look like dogshit if you do this lol
you'd expect them to reuse at least some UI elements
Steam has a bad UI, but at least I can actually find what I’m fucking looking for. I like GOG, but holy shit Galaxy is awful. I ended up having to use the website to look for Icewind Dale because the search function doesn’t actually show you results from the store.
It’s not flat out “bad,” but it IS visually inconsistent when it comes to their overall design system element library… but their visual hierarchy, their arrangement of said elements, and layout - is overall pretty well done.
My personal biggest gripe is less about element appearance, but more on how inconsistent their tab layout ends up being from page to page.
When browsing, I always struggle to find a couple of elements - usually something from the specific set of tabs I want to navigate to like the “community” home, my wishlist items, or the shopping cart.
…But really my very biggest gripe is on my Steam Deck. I have the mod for allowing customized animated grid images… and when I go to the Collections section, the loading of those images grinds browsing to a nearly unusable halt.
I would LOVE it if they did overhaul their element library to unify things, and did away with older more bloated raster formats like JPEG, PNG, GIF and H.264+MP3 in MP4s… and instead switch to something like highly optimized HEIC / AVIF / WEBP and SVG, custom fonts with embedded symbols, and VP9+opus WEBMs to modernize and shrink their asset libraries. They could even have fall-back compatibility when they detect an ancient device that can't decode them for some reason.
Not that anyone cares, but I am a Sr. UX designer who used to work in games but switched to general software like 12 yrs ago… so if anyone from Valve browses Lemmy… PM me. 😅
Wanted to better illustrate my point about asset modernization, here's an example of what I'm talking about.
This is a 7.45MB animated GIF embedded among several others on the page for Helldivers 2 store page on Steam :
Here's that same animation converted into an animated WEBP around 800KB... (I did an AVIF at 215KB with default settings from some random online conversion tool, but apparently Lemmy won't allow those to be embedded / shown directly) :
It is literally ~10% the size, looks nearly identical (could make 1:1 with less compression for just a few KB more), loads faster, and will play back in everything except e-machines from the late 1990s.
Additionally, modern formats support things like wider color gamut - which means you can create HDR assets.
Makes me wonder: Can you still mod the UI? Like back when it was still the OG green UI, you could customize it with skins. You can't still do that with the modern UI can you? 🤔
Steam UI genuinely fucks, and if you're suggesting it should be homogenized into the bland, emotionless material design full of dark patterns that every other web experience has turned into... then you, sir, can go to hell
Good design doesn't have to be bland, and what does this have to do with dark patterns?
IMO the desktop Steam client as well as the gamescope have some pretty confusing UI. Once you get used to it it's fine but that's the case for any shitty UI. Except Gamescope, which is buggy to traverse by controller (which is what it was designed for lol)
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The UI might fuck but the UX sucks
It makes me feel like it's still 2011 and I am here for it
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This is why they are actually profitable and roll out new features. Because they don't spend time redesigning old shit every time they have a new design in mind.
there is a thing called shared front-end components, so each time you need to add a button on an interface, you don't need to recreeate a new one and it looks consistent for the user. And Steam is known for being super slow at rolling out anything.
Your still have to update tests and implement shared components in the first place.
I thought it was because they made gambling open to minors and took 30% of all game sales
Gambling? Don't give steam credit for EAs hard work!
technically tf2 was the first loot box
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and somehow it's still one of the least shitty feeling megacorp websites
Because it’s actually trying to serve the user, kinda.
How else are you going to give money to them if you can't discover games on sale?
The enshitification way would be to make games hard to find. And then charge game companies for their game to be better discoverable or promoted.
Or putting subscriptions into placed they don't belong. Imagine subscriptions where you have to pay 10 usd/mo just to chat with friends on steam or install mods from the workshop or download a game at a decent speed. All of those things are free that Valve could start charging users for.
I think they don't need to enshittify because they're not publicly traded
that's probably because it's not a megacorp, but a private company owned by a single person. not a corporation at all.
there's a big difference. a corporation is owned by a board of investors. those companies are legally obligated to provide maximum return for their investors. corporations have been sued for being "too charitable to their customers" rather than maximize profits. a private company can do whatever it wants at the whims of it's owner. in this case Gabe Newell actually kind of wants to create a decent experience because that's what he believes has created their market dominance. he's right.
corporations like Ubisoft and ea are legally obligated to squeeze you for every penny in their platforms.
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it just works, its annoying at first, but nothing really changes, you learn something once and you're set
This is the thing UI designers never understand[0] - if you keep changing shit around, nobody will ever figure out how to use it. If you keep it consistent and don't make dramatic changes, users will have a much easier time using it because they don't have to keep relearning the damn thing. Consistency is the most effective UI paradigm.
[0] or to put it in better terms, they're paid to not understand this so they can justify their jobs....
Would it really be better to have as few unique bits as possible? I think that it's great to be able to tell at a glance what part of Steam you're on. It's a program with many features. Then again, you can still use Big Picture Mode if you really want to dumb it down.
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If you told me SteamOS is them giving up on fixing desktop Steam and starting over from the hardware up I'd believe you.
The profile page alone is horrific. A single interface designer each week wakes up in cold sweats having dreamt of it and not knowing what they just saw.
Some woman did a YouTube vid on this and how she would unify the design. This is a mess
I disagree, I like that the menus, icons, and buttons are visually distinct.
I absolutely hate websites where every button looks the exact same and I can only tell the difference by analyzing the page Terminator style.
Death to ui frameworks, death to bootstrap, long live custom UIs with a design language.
It has awful maintainability if you have to create a new component every time you want a new button, instead of reutilising old code in a way that changing the way one of them works should change all of them. It would also make the devs able to work faster and get to just focus on the main stuff they are working on.
Steam seems to have a lot of different Devs attempting to do their own thing from scratch again and again. And that's bad. I imagine their codebase is an absolute nightmare.
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Juxtapposed. She's done videos on a lot of popular apps. I don't agree with a lot of decisions she makes, but her comments seem to love it
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