There's been a recurring theme of users struggling to understand what happened to the Steam client when the Beta has a significant change or implementation to a certain area. These users often forgot that they had opted into the Beta program, presumably to experience some new feature before everyone else, and now that other areas are being updated they assume it's the same for everyone.

This causes some problems for community members who are attempting to troubleshoot a plea for help. Not everyone is on the Beta so it causes a lot of confusion at first. And even once it's discovered that it's a change limited to the Beta client, the forums continue to get confused users seeking help as it often not only presents a significant visual change but bugs along with it.

My proposal would be to include some visual clue to the Beta's UI so that it's clear that the version being used is a Beta version, preferably with a link off to this group's Announcements page or just the Overview page. It certainly won't catch everyone's attention but it should help a lot of users understand why their client isn't as it should.

Obviously we run into the same problem when Beta changes are pushed to the Main client, but since that's a significantly wider audience the reactions are understandable.

A quick and dirty idea would be to just borrow the banner used to alert users about the end of support for older OSes. I made a quick mop up comparing what it looks like for the OS alert and what it could look like for the Beta. It doesn't have to be this, but it really should be something.

https://gtm.you1.cn/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3285648756