Our Steam redesign failure
Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.
- Winston Churchill
Failure is the tenet of any entrepreneur.
It strips away preconceptions and reveals truths that have long eluded us. It’s this feedback that helps refine our mental models to predict the world more accurately.
Having been on a journey to become the world’s best software designers for nearly 15 years, we’re well versed with failure.
However, sometimes you have a failure that doesn’t reveal anything.
No feedback means no growth.
Our Steam redesign is one of those failures.
Let’s recap.
As mentioned in the “Where to from here” post, we need recognition. Recognition results in leverage, and leverage affords us the opportunity to solve big problems.
Permissionless redesigns are an effective means of getting recognition. Our ICONex redesign article landed us Balanced, and our WhyICX website was lauded over the official.
To get recognition, we need a product that has obvious deficiencies to improve upon and a large enough user base to help us achieve virality.
Cue Steam.
Steam has around 30 million daily active users, and the Steam community on Reddit has around 2.7 million users. A large audience, and an established distribution channel – this seemed like it would be a slam dunk.
We kicked things off January 2024, and due to time commitments from Balanced, could only make piecemeal contributions throughout the year. A month before Christmas we realised we would need to sprint to avoid it getting lost amongst all the Steam sales and new Steam Deck posts. If I had to estimate, I would say it was a month and a half of full time work all up.
After a punishing few weeks, we were ready to launch. December 18th would be the day PARROT9 was finally discovered amongst a sea of charlatans.
After a launch, we try to go about the day as if nothing has happened. Our anxiety would cripple us otherwise. So when enough time had passed, we took a deep breath, and checked to see the damage.
21 upvotes.
While the comments were supportive, it was a far cry from the splash we had hoped to make.
Maybe another subreddit would get a bit more traction, so we tried r/gaming.
These sort of arguments are tiresome. They’re inauthentic. Ignoring the long-term sustainability of a company that sells games no one actually plays, Valve explicitly states in their employee handbook that they assess candidates on how dangerous they’d be in the hands of the competition. Deliberately making yourself vulnerable to competition due to apathy goes against everything Valve claims to stand for.
In all of my anxious predictions, I never once considered that users might not want better software.
If we couldn’t get Steam’s users to understand that, then maybe it was time to just send it directly to Valve. After all, no one knows Steam better than them. Surely they wouldn’t be foolish enough to ignore problematic issues with their interface. They’ll be so excited to have people who espouse the same values as them, but can also see the problems they can’t – or so we thought:
I used to think the most frustrating thing was not being recognised for our talents amongst a sea of charlatans. Now I realise that it’s being right while nearly everyone else is wrong.
Good design is a well-reasoned debate. No matter what someone challenges with, good design decisions should always prevail.
The Steam redesign essentially boils down to 2 core arguments:
1. Aggregating everything to a single page is better than tabs.
2. There’s too much wasted space.
Number 1 is the most debatable. You could argue that tabs act as jump links, allowing you to quickly jump to sections faster than scrolling. However, in our experience users tend to only click around if they’re lost. This is for the same reason that carousels are ineffective. Additionally, exploration only happens if the content is engaging, and the majority of the content presented to the user is not. Also even if you have a single page, you can still have “tabs” that just act as jump-links. Finally, scrolling is such a natural part of digital life that it only makes sense to leverage that same pattern here.
Number 2 is not debatable. There is a clear waste of space on all the feeds. The right hand column is often void of any information at all. In order to make better use of the space, switching to a 2-column format is the obvious solution. It allows more information density without sacrificing readability.
So the real question is: where to from here?
Let’s start with what we know:
- We’re never going to get the opportunity to solve these problems until others acknowledge that they exist.
- Valve is infinitely more likely to pay attention if Steam’s users are advocating for us.
- People don’t read online, and the redesign article is 24 minutes long.
A PARROT9 maxim is to share the most value, in the shortest time, with the least friction. We haven’t done that yet – but a prototype could. In my experience, even with high-fidelity mock-ups stakeholders can’t connect all the dots until they are using the interface themselves.
The prototype will take time, and until it is finished we need to introduce doubt into the Steam community. Doubt that the interface isn’t as good as it could be, and belief that it can be better. This will be difficult. Valve generally has a good reputation which means any introduction of doubt will be met with a lot of resistance and defensiveness.
We’ll need to start gently.
Redesigning some of the Steam showcases could be effective here. They reek of low effort, don’t utilise space effectively, and are such an obvious but small enough piece of the interface that people won’t push back.
If a lot of the stuff looks obvious with very little change, then it calls into question their abilities by neglecting a lot of low hanging fruit. If we can build up a cadence that people start expecting and looking forward to these redesigns, by the time we launch the prototype we should have a receptive audience to present to.
Until next time.