Can't read the text above?Try another text or an audio CAPTCHAText in the box:What's this?I'm gonna pick up the pieces, And build a Lego house If things go wrong we can knock it downMy three words have two meanings, There's one thing on my mind It's all for youAnd it's dark in a cold December, but I've got you to keep me warm If you're broken I will mend you and I'll keep you sheltered from the storm that's raging on nowI'm out of touch, I'm out of luck I'll pick you up when you're getting down And out of all these things I've done I think I love you better now I'm out of sight, I'm out of mind I'll do it all for you in time And out of all these things I've done I think I love you better nowI'm gonna paint you by numbers And color you in If things go right we can frame it and put you on a wallAnd it's so hard to say it but I've been there before Now I'll surrender up my heart And swap it for yoursI'm out of touch, I'm out of love
And out of all these things I've done I think I love you betterDon't hold me down I think my braces are breaking, and it's more than I can takeAnd it's dark in a cold December, but I've got you to keep me warm If you're broken I will mend you and I'll keep you sheltered from the storm that's raging on nowI'm out of touch, I'm out of love And out of all these things I've done I think I love you better nowI'm out of touch, I'm out of luck And out of all these things I've done I will love you better nowSure, the Three Little Pigs built their houses out of straw, then sticks, then bricks. But did they ever think about using Lego? A few years ago people actually built a life-size house out of normal-sized Lego. A British TV show called “James May’s Toy Stories” brought together 1,200 people to build it, and it took them over a month! The 20-foot-tall striped house, which used more than 3 million bricks, even had a working toilet, a shower with running hot water, and a bumpy bed that probably wouldn’t be so comfy to sleep on.
So many people wanted to help build the house that they started lining up at 4:30 a.m. that first day. No Big Bad Wolf ever came to blow the house down: it stood for a few days, then a team took it apart and gave away the pieces to kids. But we think this might have been strong enough for that third little pig. Wee ones: If the house used 5 Lego colors but you wanted to add green, how many colors would the house use then? Little kids: If the stripes were white, red, blue, yellow, black, and then started over to repeat, what color would the 12th stripe be? Bonus: If you stand as tall as the 20th stripe, how many full sets of 5 colors would that be? Big kids: Can you write the number 3 million in digits? How many zeros do you need? Bonus: The volunteers started building on August 1 of that year, and finished on September 17. How many days after starting did they finish? Wee ones: 6 colors. Little kids: Red: since the colors repeat in 5s, it would be the same color as the 2nd stripe.
Bonus: 4 full sets. Big kids: 3,000,000, which has 6 zeros. August has 31 days, so August 31 is 30 days after the start. Then you add another 17 days.At 5am on a cold, misty morning, my plane tumbled to a stop in a strange land where I didn’t speak a word of the language. I was about to embark on one of the best (and most bizarre) adventures I’d had so far — working as a designer at LEGO HQ in Denmark.I was fresh-faced, just a few weeks after finishing university, and about to be thrown into the deep end of my first real design job.Over the course of my time there, I would work on a secret project, a real life ‘LEGO House’ — a 12,000 square metre new spiritual home for the cult brand, standing 23 metres tall. The ‘House’ was to be filled with slightly surreal digital and physical experiences showing the values and future vision for LEGO.That sink-or-swim experience influences much of my approach today. Here are the top five things I picked up inbetween all of the pickled herring, liquorice-flavoured everything, and hygge*.
Often as a designer or entrepreneur, the focus is on the product, testing learning and shipping — however, the product is merely one piece of the experience puzzle. Where are the users when they interact with it? What were they doing before? How did they discover it? What will they do after? These are all part of the broader product experience. Every product, whether it may seem like it or not, is a service of some kind, and needs to be considered holistically within the user’s journey.At LEGO, the approach is to actually map the experiential journey that the product or service will exist within and seek to understand how that can be made better.Below is one of the tools LEGO uses to plot the user’s mood across the various touch-points of the journey, diving into how the user feels and their situation at any one moment.Every pain point is an opportunity to be won or wasted, and can add to the product experience… or easily subtract from it.For a product to be truly sticky, it needs to be more than functional, connecting on an emotional level — to be a joy to use… like, actually fun.
Of course, this doesn’t mean throwing unnecessary animations in left, right and centre. The user’s path to completing a goal within the product should never be impeded by pointless fluff, but there are always novel ways to accomplish a task or fun elements can be embedded into the experience.This is a key part of the LEGO philosophy; embed little surprising moments of play into everything. Although perhaps this isn’t surprising for a toy company. However, this approach is now being applied in markets where it wouldn’t have in the past — take the popular example of Slack, which sits in the ever so lively enterprise communication space… with other fun products like… At the end of the day, any product will be used by real people, so building small moments of delight (what designer Oki Sato calls ‘!’ moments) can be the difference between success or sighs.At LEGO, I had the pencil snatched out of my hand and was told – don’t sketch it… build it.You can perceive the form and functionality of anything so much better once you make it more tangible, and realising something in physical form is one of the best ways of doing this.
Foam models and paper prototypes may seem crude and childlike next to CAD or wire-framing tools, but absolutely nothing beats sense-checking in the real world — the sooner something can be tested, the sooner it can be improved. Something that is astoundingly obvious when you are holding a physical model in your hand and trying it out may be completely lost in the 2D world of a computer screen or on paper.Get it off the paper.Sometimes the only way to fix something… is to take it apart and start again.When something doesn’t work, it is all too easy to try to fall into the trap of simply fixing it, which will get you back on track as quickly as possible. But this misses the real opportunity, which is to actually re-build with a new understanding of the previous design’s weaknesses.Just as with making something out of LEGO; it’s always quicker to create something a second time, because your understanding of it runs a little deeper. You know where the awkward parts are, so you can change your approach.
Although it can seem crazy or painful to start again or intentionally break apart something that you put time into creating, the end result will be all the better for it.In the same way that Twitter’s famous 140 character limit frees people from the burden of producing a masterpiece, (and led to significant growth in its early years) LEGO frees people to build quickly, effectively — but most importantly, roughly.Lower fidelity lowers the barrier to entry — everyone can try and anyone can succeed. There is no wrong way to connect simple plastic bricks, and no wrong way to tweet. It is a playground safe from failure. It is much in the same way that many are hesitant to draw in front of a group or are put off by the pressure of a blank page (just think about how often you hear the phrase: “but I can’t draw!”). Whilst drawing may offer more scope and depth, there also comes the perception that someone can miss the mark… creating a subconscious barrier to entry.I said 5 at the start.