Steam, with a gender-neutral approach

Hi there! ❤️

This is a preview of a design for Steam that I did as part of my college's final project assignment for my bachelor's degree. In this project, I was interested with the concept of gender-neutral design in UI/UX design, something that is probably overlooked by majority of people, and decided to use that topic for my thesis in college.

🎮 Why Steam?

Steam is a PC gaming platform that has a masculine design interface. This masculine design interface negatively impacts female user’s sense of ambient belonging, resulting in low female user percentage in the platform.

My final project aims to create a better experience in Steam for both male and female users alike using gender-neutral design theory.

🧐 The Design Process

The design process follows the standard User-centered Design process that consists of planning, defining the context of use, specifying the user requirements, producing the design solution, and evaluating the design. For a design concept that is user-centric like gender-neutral design, UCD seems to be a perfect fit for the job. In addition to UCD, I also utilized Google's Material Design to help me in the production process. Surprisingly enough, Material Design's design principles have a lot in common with gender-neutral design principles. The design is then tested to several users with Usability Testing, where I evaluated the design both qualitatively, using interviews and direct observation throughout the testing session, and quantitatively, using the corresponding metrics to evaluate the usability and user experience goals.

If you're interested with the metrics used for this project, do check it out in my portfolio here