Steam Desktop UI needs to get its priorities right.

The landing page of Steam's desktop application sends you straight to Steam's store, which is a mess of buttons, options and images, which is quite the turn off. As I frequently use the application to access my games on Steam, it always irks me to have to go through this page.


Users don't buy games on a daily basis, so it doesn't make sense that Steam's landing page should be it's store. It almost seems as though it was a design decision aimed purely at earning more money instead of improving the user's experience.

In addition, the page itself seems to be extremely choppy, likely due to the large number of images / videos it needs to process.
In fact, it does remind me a little of yahoo's landing page, albeit worse - a classic example of having too many things going on on a single screen. Which reminds me of a talk I attended before on UI/UX a while back, the speaker (Su Yuen) mentioned that for each screen on the application, choose only 3 main actions for the user to allow on the screen - simplicity is best.



The entire Steam desktop application seems to have a feature bloat, trying to throw everything that their website does into the desktop GUI. In fact it seems that the desktop GUI just acts as a browser for the Steam website (you can see the website link at the top left in green), albeit slower and choppier. Pretty sure it would have been better off separating the two to give the desktop GUI a cleaner feel.


They should really learn from Blizzard's Battle.net application though, the landing page brings you straight to the games. The most prominent thing is the large "Play" button which all the more entices the user to play the game straight away. Only the most relevant thing is shown to the user at the start - the games, everything else is secondary (the Battlenet shop is in another tab).

Comments

  1. Jon Hill5 December 2022 at 23:33

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