Valve needs to incorporate more AJAX techniques in steam community

[Burekman]

For a long time now, pretty much since the UI redesign in 2010, I felt like the steam community was outdated compared to the store. The latter just felt more "slick" and pleasant to use.

It wasn't until a week ago that I realized, the number one reason for this was the heavy usage of AJAX techniques. In contrast, these are severely lacking on parts of the community site. Two examples where the usage of AJAX would offer a much better user experience:

The games list. Clicking on a new tab or ordering the list by "name" or "playtime" results in the whole page reloading, instead of just the list updating. It detracts from a good user experience.

Another example is the screenshot page. Again, clicking on different tabs reloads the whole page, and choosing a different group does the same as well. Completely unnecessary.

All of this probably requires a lot of work and rewriting existing code, but I do hope they will consider updating their community at some point to reflect the more modern design techniques.

[nibaniban]

but old style can be more compatible to any browsers

[Thebigone]

AJAX is good for dynamic content like comments, the storefront, etc, but it's probably pretty resource intensive. Screenshots and lists of games are pretty static content, and easily stored in cache.
You're right though, it might improve the user experience - but at what cost? The Steam Community goes down every now and then at peak load anyway, I don't see how AJAX would help that at all.

[Burekman]

Originally Posted by Thebigone

AJAX is good for dynamic content like comments, the storefront, etc, but it's probably pretty resource intensive. Screenshots and lists of games are pretty static content, and easily stored in cache.
You're right though, it might improve the user experience - but at what cost? The Steam Community goes down every now and then at peak load anyway, I don't see how AJAX would help that at all.

Screenshots can be just as dynamic as comments, if you upload enough of them from different games.

And the current pages are indeed static because Valve designed them to be. AJAX could help improve that, make it so we can order and filter games lists based on many different criteria, not just playtime and name, both of which are currently poorly implemented from an UX perspective.

As for resource usage, as long as they don't go beyond facebook with the amount scripting they do, I don't see a problem. They won't have nearly as many users as them anyway.