Steam Helpchat
During the second phase of DesignLab’s UX Academy, I was tasked with adding a social feature to an already-existing entertainment application. I immediately jumped at the opportunity, choosing Steam as my app of choice. I designed a supplement to Steam’s existing group chat function to encourage user engagement and reward helpful members of the Steam community.
Background
Steam is one of the most popular digital distribution platforms for PC games. Originally created by Valve as a platform to automatically distribute updates to their games, the platform has since expanded to incorporate anti-cheat, matchmaking, social networking, mod support, and DRM services for over 34,000 third-party titles all purchasable through Steam’s storefront. The service maintains at least 132 million monthly active users who post regularly to Steam’s built-in forums, community hubs, and help centers.
Despite its large user base and long history of development, Steam’s communication is very direct and simple. Users are able to interact through community hubs through discussion forums, help guides, and a general group chat with only messaging itself as a means to communicate. While user reviews and ratings exist on the Steam storefront, there was no similar functionality I could identify within its community hubs that provided a similar level of interactivity. My goal then for this exercise became to identify what users liked about Steam’s community features and what features would encourage increased social engagement.
Reaching Out to Users
My initial interviews with longtime Steam users revealed that many were not extensive users of Steam’s community hubs or forums, but were avid users of Steam’s user-maintained guides and user-curated game reviews. The users I interviewed viewed Steam more as a game library than as a social app, but I noticed that all of the users I interviewed still made some use of Steam’s community whenever they needed assistance. If they were having technical issues or needed to ask a question about how a game worked, Steam’s community hub was preferred to any external website or service. As one of the oldest platforms in the PC gaming market, Steam has accrued a robust community of reviewers, guide writers, and forum enthusiasts that were a boon to the platform overall even if many users didn’t directly contribute to it.
With this in mind, I decided to focus on combining the Steam community’s established culture with their existing group chat to create a social feature that would allow users to share and rate useful information in real time. I wanted to design a feature that would make reviewing a game or assisting others an act of active engagement rather than passive viewing.
Proposed Feature Design:
After a few days of work, I came up with a proposal for Steam Helpchat. Similar to Discussions or Reviews, the Helpchat would be a new tab under a game’s community hub accessible by any of Steam’s users. Like Steam’s existing Group Chat, the Helpchat would be a persistent chatroom to allow users to communicate in real time. However, unlike Group Chat Helpchat would be split into multiple rooms, each dedicated to a single discussion topic.
Also unlike Group Chat, user messages would have visible stats based on engagement. These stats would track the number of users who found the chat helpful or unhelpful, as well as the number of replies each message got. While chats would not be persistent after a certain amount of time, replies to a user’s message would be highlighted and accessible by clicking directly on the message.
Users would be able to view all of their own message’s ratings, but others would only be able to view the number of positive responses. The exception to this are replies, which allow a user to also view the replying post’s negative ratings.
Along with the live chat, each chatroom would have a mode that allows users to view the current highest-rated messages within the chat. Messages with a net positive rating would remain persistent in this chat for longer than usual, based on the overall number of positive ratings. The more positive ratings a message receives, the longer it remains visible within the top chat. Similarly, users whose messages gained net-negative ratings would need to wait longer between making posts to disincentivize trolling or unhelpful messages.
Users who accrue enough positive ratings or engage enough with a single game’s Helpchat would gain the ability to request new chatrooms, allowing the most helpful voices within the community to drive conversation and to encourage constructive messaging. The focus of the Helpchat feature is to build off of a game’s existing userbase and encourage more active interaction.
Wireframing
To create the wireframes and prototype of my proposed feature, I spent extensive time studying Steam’s UI to create something I felt combined the best features of Steam’s existing Reviews, Discussions, and Chat functionality. I designed Helpchat with clarity and ease of use in mind, to fit with Steam’s already utilitarian and readable interface.
Tester Feedback
To see how Steam users would interact with my proposed Helpchat, I contacted more longtime users and walked them through its functionality to see if it was something they would consider useful. Reactions to my proposed feature were mixed. While many of my prototype testers said that the feature was interesting and that it might be more useful than searching Steam’s existing forums, they also said that they were already satisfied with Steam’s existing features. In addition, many struggled with the UI and pointed out inconsistencies and accessibility issues. Overall though, many of my testers approved of my proposed feature and believed it would be a useful addition to the platform.
Iteration
Following my initial user tests, I went back to correct some accessibility issues identified as consistent problems during testing. Some were caused by Steam’s existing branding and could not be corrected completely without deviating too far, but others were simple enough that correction did not cause the elements to stand out. The largest change between my tested prototype and the final version were the way message ratings appeared to the user.
While testing all ratings were only visible on a user’s page. I believed this would make the chat less cluttered, but testers expressed that the lack of visible ratings in chat made it difficult to tell apart messages at a glance. With the ratings and number of respondents added in the final version, it became much easier for users to determine which messages were helpful and which they could ignore.
Final Prototype
My second round of user testing received much more positive feedback, the changes made to chat readability immediately noticed by returning testers and commended. Testers who had not participated in the first round of tests also pointed out the addition as a positive, citing that it was easier to access than navigating away from the chat to find the full breakdown of message ratings.
Conclusion
I believe that while Steam already satisfies the majority of users’ needs in regards to technical support and user reviews, my proposed Helpchat feature addresses an engagement niche left unaddressed by Steam’s current user communication options. While chat, forums, and guides allow users to share information easily without a better method to sort this information it becomes difficult to identify what is useful and what may be unreliable or outdated. While I need to further iterate on this feature idea, I believe I’ve identified a method to improve the quality of Steam’s user engagement without compromising any of Steam’s existing social functionality.
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