A simple mistake. Steam has a new and improved voice chat, so to let users know about it they put “Psst, try our new & improved voice chat!” on all the IM windows. They also added a background foreground image of an interesting little character to the IM window. The problem, aside from the fact that you can’t make it go away, is that it’s not a background image, it’s a foreground image that floats on top of your IM text and covers it up. Nothing major, it can be fixed with a few lines of code to put the image beneath the text. But lets take it a step further and create a new way to inform users of the new & improved voice chat feature.

• Remove the little character. Bye bye little one.
• Move the “Never tell your password to anyone” warning text to be above and out of the message area. This way it’s always visible to serve as a reminder.
• The “Try our new and improved voice chat” text should be moved down into the message area and changed to a brighter and more readable yellow color so it stands out a bit more.
• The START VOICE CHAT button should also be highlighted in the same color yellow, so users associate it with the text.
• When a user scrolls down and the “try our new voice chat” text disappears, the yellow highlight around the START VOICE CHAT button should also disappear.
• And / or add a small “x” close button to the end of the “try our new voice chat” text so the user can get rid of it.

What do you think?