I havent liked a single one of these re-designs of the client that I have seen.

Do not add extra clicks to ANYTHING. Two or more tiered nested menus are dog

Do NOT remove any of the multiple ways of accomplishing anything. Big brains think it is redundancy to have 3 ways to do anything when it is actually ease of use. See: Excel

Do not rely exclusively on a tiled view. Some of us despise that and prefer lists with these crazy things called WORDS.

Not directed at you personally but UI designers have been some of the most head up ass people Ive come across. They want to "leave their mark" or some nonsense when what you really should be striving for is to leave no "marks" at all.

Revert it back to the ~2010 design, UI design peaked around that time and only gotten significantly worse since.

Very much appreciated! We will be probably adding a survey at some point. (not in steam) To keep it simple, depending on the amount of people that would like to join, it will be only questions with short answer spaces. Thats why every long opinion (also like yours) is welcomed in this thread ♥

Cheers, Ray :)

Originally posted by tyl0413:

Revert it back to the ~2010 design, UI design peaked around that time and only gotten significantly worse since.

Thanks for joining :)

Do you have any little more specific memory about any form of direction?
Any specific part that you liked a lot back then or hated back then when it changed?

Cheers

There are, of course, things in the client that I don't use/care about, like the whole chat-stuff. Also, I use the web-version of the store and the forums, not the things that are built into the client.

However, one of the main advantages that Steam has from an UI/UX perspective is the fact that it's a sleek, non-overhead, non-flashy UI that's very much focused on/limited to the task it wants to accomplish.

As such, I'm pretty happy that you're doing this as a pet project, and Steam hasn't hired you to do an actual redesign, Whatever you do, it won't cause problems with the actual client, so do whatever you want...

The client used to be better in the old days, but it could be worse.

Originally posted by GoodGuyTaco:

Originally posted by tyl0413:

Revert it back to the ~2010 design, UI design peaked around that time and only gotten significantly worse since.

Thanks for joining :)

Do you have any little more specific memory about any form of direction?
Any specific part that you liked a lot back then or hated back then when it changed?

Cheers

Seems like AI post honestly..
Flat design is ugly, every button is oversized like its made for a touchscreen, new Chromium based Steam is bloated af, uses 1GB RAM while right before the update that ruined the library it used 100MB and its buggy af and removed a lot of features.

The only major change for me was when they went from Green to Black. After that it's pretty much been the same.

Some small changes here and there. Nothing to get worked up about.

Originally posted by tyl0413:

Seems like AI post honestly..
Flat design is ugly, every button is oversized like its made for a touchscreen, new Chromium based Steam is bloated af, uses 1GB RAM while right before the update that ruined the library it used 100MB and its buggy af and removed a lot of features.

My Steam takes 300 MB when it's open.
As for bugs. I can't remember the last time Steam ever bugged out for me or even crashed after all of these years.

I remember in the start when the Friend system wasn't working. But that was like 15+ years ago or so.

What are these bugs you are encountering? Maybe something is wrong with your PC or whichever OS you use if it's not Win10 or 11.

Originally posted by tyl0413:

Originally posted by GoodGuyTaco:

Thanks for joining :)

Do you have any little more specific memory about any form of direction?
Any specific part that you liked a lot back then or hated back then when it changed?

Cheers

Seems like AI post honestly..
Flat design is ugly, every button is oversized like its made for a touchscreen, new Chromium based Steam is bloated af, uses 1GB RAM while right before the update that ruined the library it used 100MB and its buggy af and removed a lot of features.

It isn't don't worry, that is why I am leaving my account on public so y'all can see I'm just a dude that plays games since ages. But our project is a UI/UX improvement and steam was on our list :D just appreciate any comments, I was a bit insecure if we really would find some people that would gift us their time in a short period of time given by our strict time shedule kinda ^^

Any features you miss specifically?

Originally posted by GoodGuyTaco:

We will be probably adding a survey at some point.

I wouldn't do that on Steam.

Improperly gather or distribute information

Examples of such prohibited behavior include: harvesting or otherwise collecting information about others, including e-mail addresses; and distributing surveys, multi-level marketing materials, chain letters, or junk email.

https://store.steampowered.com/online_conduct

Try the r/Steam reddit.

Originally posted by cSg|mc-Hotsauce:

Originally posted by GoodGuyTaco:

We will be probably adding a survey at some point.

I wouldn't do that on Steam.

Improperly gather or distribute information

Examples of such prohibited behavior include: harvesting or otherwise collecting information about others, including e-mail addresses; and distributing surveys, multi-level marketing materials, chain letters, or junk email.

https://store.steampowered.com/online_conduct

Try the r/Steam reddit.

:nkCool:

Oh well then yes, didnt say anthing about survey :) Won't do that here then.

Appreciate the information! Wouldn't have wanted the surprise of being banned or punished or smth :D

Originally posted by Zefar:

The only major change for me was when they went from Green to Black. After that it's pretty much been the same.

Some small changes here and there. Nothing to get worked up about.

Originally posted by tyl0413:

Seems like AI post honestly..
Flat design is ugly, every button is oversized like its made for a touchscreen, new Chromium based Steam is bloated af, uses 1GB RAM while right before the update that ruined the library it used 100MB and its buggy af and removed a lot of features.

My Steam takes 300 MB when it's open.
As for bugs. I can't remember the last time Steam ever bugged out for me or even crashed after all of these years.

I remember in the start when the Friend system wasn't working. But that was like 15+ years ago or so.

What are these bugs you are encountering? Maybe something is wrong with your PC or whichever OS you use if it's not Win10 or 11.

Hopefully you won't take it the wrong way when I say that this is a bit of a classic "Works for me" scenario. It works for you, so you're inclined to suggest it may be the other user's OS, system or rig that's causing the problem and not steam itself.

Some people use it with just the right hardware (eg. where gpu accel rendering works well with the drivers), just the right OS version, they use only steam's basic features, and they don't have a large friendslist. Or they don't use the ingame overlay much, or they don't chain actions and clicks very quickly. So it works quite ok for them.

Others have slightly different rigs, OS/version, or a large friendslist (that has had a lot of weird issues), or they use a lot of the menus and features etc., they click fast, and discover a lot of bugs.

Despite the variables, I can at least say this with confidence: Steam is a very buggy app. The fact that it works just fine for some people does not disprove this. It's buggy as fudge.

I've used it since 2007, on win7, xp, win10, and several linux distros. Talked to plenty of others, and experience+verdict is abundantly clear, it's a buggy app. A stroll through the forums searching for bugs, problems, issues with steamwebhelper, etc. provides a pretty indigestibly long list of issues this app has had and still has.

steamwebhelper crashing, steamwebhelper bleeding memory, steam main process bleeding memory, steam botching its own update and getting caught in an infinite launch-crash-respawn loop, popup menus vanishing and requiring multiple clicks to work properly, overlay crashing, overlay tabbing you out to desktop, absurdly high memory usage for the simplest of things, etc..

These are all things I've verified myself, and they're issues multiple people have had, it was not some quirk of the user/system/rig/os, it was steam's fault. I know it sounds corny to throw it in here, but for context; I've been using and building PCs since the 90's, used every version of Windows to date, Linux for decades, and programmed from backend to GUI from C/C++ to Python and javascript/html. I know shoddy work when I see it, and steam has some pretty shoddy work thrown in. It's hands down one of the buggiest applications I've ever used.

They do some things pretty well, I'll give them that, but the user interface and graphical aspects, that whole area, are a mess. Since it's now a mixmash of CEF, Electron and a bunch of native binaries and scripts, this isn't really a surprise. Electron alone effectively means emulating a mini internet with webserver backend, network, browser and full html stack just to show buttons and text, which is just.. a complete joke of a way to do things, in the long run.

Therefore I think it'll be interesting to see what comes out of this experiment. Steam could use a solid rewrite, as it's put together quite messy right now.