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- cross-posted to:
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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
Incoporating multiple styles sounds like more work than it’s worth. Can we talk about tech debt?
I always get sweaty when working software.
it’s summer, take off the “programming socks”
Nah, they’re medically necessary.
Steam revamped its UI, it’s still not consistent but some elements in this picture are no more
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.
See the base app is decent, but I still feel the old steam UI was better. At least that UIs in game overlay actually worked more often, and didn’t use crappy icons for nav
I miss the native UI with the og steam green colors, honestly I wish they’d switch back to that instead of everything being a web view
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
Steam is a bastard child of monopoly. They don’t innovate because they barely have any competition.
And to this dya one cant fucking increase font size in Steam. Fuck them, I’m old, the letters are a little to small for me. Even fucking browsers allow for font changes, but not Steam. Fuck them.
That’s right, that’s why they worked their asses off improving Linux support, designing new controllers and the steam deck.
Also a great VR Headset and the runtime used by this and many other VR Headsets. If anyone is actually innovating it’s Valve. Everyone else is mostly trying to catch up to the features Steam provides.
Steam isn’t just the client, it’s also a ton of APIs (steamworks sdk) and services available to developers for integration with Steam, Steam workshop, distribution of updates, cloud save, multiplayer, chat, achievements etc.
No other launcher comes even close in terms of functionality even if the UI isn’t perfect.
Shouldn’t Steam client scale with whatever DPI scaling you have set up?
And they still refuse to let their software be handled properly by the window manager. It’s really annoying.
There is a scaling factor for the GUI (by default it checks your monitor’s DPI).
There are plenty of competitors to Steam. They just suck in comparison.
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)
Sure but bland is often that kind of design often ends up as…
Yeah, dark patterns are NOT good UX, even though unfortunately it’s present everywhere nowdays.
Steam’s UI/UX can be better, more ordered, coherent and standardized. This does not mean that it has to incorporate dark patterns.
I like Material Design. It helps unify the experience of android.
The UI might fuck but the UX sucks
It makes me feel like it’s still 2011 and I am here for it
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
The first known instance of a loot-box system is believed to be an item called “Gachapon ticket” which was introduced in the Japanese version of MapleStory, a side-scrolling MMORPG, in June 2004.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_box#History
Tf2 wasn’t released until 2007, and it didn’t ship with any unlocking let alone loot, the first unlockable items were added 2 years later in 2009: https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Item_timeline_in_2009
CS:GO started it.
Man, looked at my bank statement many years ago and noticed several little charges. A few cents here and a few cents there. The biggest one was maybe .80 cents.
My son had fallen for some scam ran by a YouTuber and was buying and trading skins.
I will say though, now that time has passed, some of those skins are worth insane amounts of money. I’d sell them if I wasn’t so stupid sentimental.
My son got in trouble for doing that, but it still takes me back to a pleasant time when I look at the inventory.
Last time I said something similar people down voted my comment all the way lol
Some woman did a YouTube vid on this and how she would unify the design. This is a mess
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
What decisions you don’t agree with? It’s just fun to watch UX ideas :)
They are fun to watch, but surely you don’t agree with every change she makes either
Don’t call me surely
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.
Based
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.
There’s the other side of maintenence that you don’t have to worry about messing other parts up if you change that one drop down menu since it’s the only place it’s used. It sometimes takes less time to do it this way.
I still think that the dropdowns should be unified, one view for desktop and one for mobile.
Sure but this post proves there isn’t a design language. Besides “dark background + sans serif text” many elements are disjointed. It’s fine and it works, but it’s clear each feature was done by a separate team with their own decisions of what said feature should look like
If all the buttons and menus all looked the same wouldn’t it be a lot harder to find what you’re looking for? Wouldn’t you want some things to stand out, especially if that’s what your users are used to?
I think the issue is consistency. Not making everything look the same, but have a common design language.
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?
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.
It’s designed as if it was still on Windows 7
Good. I don’t want new ‘modern’ shitty flat UI.
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…
Barf. I hate it. No ty
I hate how Steam has bloated over time.
It still looks fine to me.
