Steam Store Redesign
Our sponsor for this project, the Valve Corporation, is a digital distribution company that makes its earnings primarily from its video game distribution platform known as Steam. Our team aims to enhance the user experience of the Steam online store by redesigning it to align with current design practices and counter any existing issues. Our goal is to improve user interaction and interest in using Steam among its current and potential user base, who may be tempted by better deals and platform exclusives offered by burgeoning competitor platforms like Discord and the Epic Games Store.
Our poster displayed at the presentation of our project can be found at the bottom of the page.
Git Repository: https://github.com/nikita-morozov/Steam_Store
Design Question
How can we improve the existing Steam webstore to facilitate better game discoverability and improve the functionality of the store?
Skills Used
• User Research
• Persona Creation
• User Journey Mapping
• Information Architecture Creation
• Paper Prototyping
• Usability Testing
• Wireframing
• High-Fidelity Prototyping
• Software Development
Tools Used
• Visual Studio Code
• Adobe Illustrator
Executive Summary
This capstone project was a six-month-long process. Our goals were to ensure that the various things that matter to the user were improved and the process of using the service was as a whole better. To accomplish this, we first did a deep dive into the product (Steam) along with various competing products to find out what competitors offer that Steam is possibly missing. After completing our competitive analysis, we interviewed seven Steam users to find out what they liked and disliked about Steam and what things were clear pain points in their use. We asked questions regarding various aspects of the store as well to identify what is used and what is not used from the offerings on Steam. Then, with the interviewee's pain points in mind, we followed up with a survey that was completed by approximately 300 participants which we used to ensure that the feelings/opinions of our interview participants translated to the greater Steam community. After collecting our data, and generating meaningful findings, we moved on to create a couple personas of Steam users to have a better idea of who we are designing for and a User Journey Map (based on our collected data) to better understand user's emotions throughout the process of using the store. Finally, we started designing and after getting a mostly fleshed out design, myself and two other team members started developing the design in React while finalizing our design. We presented our prototype at the Capstone Open House on June 7th, 2019 and a few days later presented our final design and prototype to our sponsor Valve. We were surprised in late June to see that Valve used a large portion of our design in their own temporary redesign for their "Summer Sale".
Our Research Findings
To start our user research, we interviewed seven Steam users, asking questions that deconstructed the motives, needs, and thought processes of the participants while using Steam. After going through the data, we created an affinity diagram of participant quotes in order to generate clear findings from all the interviews. In the end, we narrowed it down to four key insights:
Long-time Steam Users Resist Change: even though the mainline Steam interface hasn’t changed in nearly a decade, interviews have shown that current users are used to and even attached the current UI of the store. Furthermore, certain users despised “stealth-UI” changes such as the one that Steam had published for their chat.
Steam is Already the Preferred Client: one thing that was very clear from our interviews is that of all the clients that exist (comprised of Steam and its competitors), Steam is by far the preferred client.
Sales (and Price) Take High Priority in Purchasing Decisions: From our interviews, we found sales and low pricing to be a strong, if not a primary reason, for purchasing games.
Users Value Reviews from Trusted Sources: Every participant mentioned that they look for an indication of quality. This took the form of ratings, reviews, YouTubers, or friends’ opinions. Whatever the medium, each participant had a select few sources that they referenced when deciding to purchase a game.
Next, we took these findings and ensured that they meshed well with the opinions of the greater Steam community by releasing a survey that was completed by around 300 participants from 26 different countries over the course of five days. From this data, we had four more findings:
New Users are More Excited for a Steam Store Redesign: Users seem to be interested in a remodel, but not a rebuilding.
Game Sales Matter but the Special Offers Section is not Used: A large number of respondents that find sales to be important don’t actually utilize the Special Offers category.
Price Really Matters; Livestreams, Not So Much: Our data shows that price plays the biggest role in user decision to purchase a game. On the flipside, hardly anyone cares for the livestream feature.
No Obvious Alternative to Steam: Our data shows that Steam cannot easily be replaced by one of its competitors at this point.
How I Contributed
For this project, our team worked collaboratively throughout the entire design and development processes. However, I personally contributed in six main ways:
Interview/Survey
Along with helping to design our interview script and our survey, I also acted as the "editor" in a sense by ensuring that the language used was clear and that what we were asking gave us the proper insight we wanted to learn more about.
Personas
While I did not design the personas, I worked closely with my team member who did to help her ensure that the language used fit well and conveyed the average Steam user in a way that benefited our design process.
User Journey Map
With some input from my team members, I designed and created the User Journey Map based on all of our research findings.
Design
During the ideation phase of our design, I pushed strongly for using cards with drop-downs and overlays to decrease the number of clicks/page transfers required for the users to learn what they wanted to about a game. In the end, this was a vital aspect of our design that increased usability and eliminated pain points.
UI Kit
While I did not design the UI Kit entirely, I helped to solidify the kit and make sure the styling was consistent and clear throughout, along with giving input about how certain components should change when they are interacted with.
Development
Due to our massive time crunch and the enormity of the task at hand, I spent countless hours developing our design in React component by component, ensuring that our prototype matched exactly with our design while also being soft-coded.
Final Thoughts
This project, although very trying and time consuming, was an extremely rewarding experience. Valve is a very horizontal company, which meant that we had to create structure for ourselves to work within as opposed to being given a project with a defined end goal. While that might at first sound like it would make it easier, we found it more difficult to define our own goals and set our "finish line." However, through our perseverance, willingness to learn, and our desire to prove ourselves, we managed to meet our goals and complete our project on time and to the quality we all wanted.
In late June, we were surprised (and honored) to find that Steam decided to use a large portion of our design in their temporary redesign for their Summer Sale.
You can visit an archived (not perfect) version of Steam's Summer Sale design here:
