Usability Forum

LEGO of Frustration

By Eddie Lopez. Wednesday, 31. January 2007, 01:43:00

manuals, everyday things, instructions, bad design, toys

I thought the point of LEGO was that there wasn't supposed to be any instructions?

I've been known to put together a LEGO ship or two in my day. I have a son and as anyone with kids will tell you, a large number of LEGO sets these days are more "model" kits than building blocks of infinite imagination. I run a 50/50 split at the Lopez house- 50% just blocks and about 50% kits. While he runs wild with the blocks, when it comes to the model it's a father/son effort.

This got me to notice a big oversight in the "instruction manual" (I still have a hard time putting that in the context of LEGO). They do cover all their bases, they just could be a bit more "user centered" when it comes to putting these things together....

So we have..

All the pieces you need for each step (upper left corner)
The call outs showing (what I'll call) the subroutines (top-center)
A nice, consistent picture of the whole project.

We all know that when we're actively involved in building something or problem solving, we don't have a strong interest in the directions, but the difference is that you're really not going to be able to accomplish these model kits without 'em, but there are a few things that were overlooked:

Oversight One:
Each these steps seem to have a focus, like in the picture the fly-out section is the clear focus point of the step, but you might very easily overlook the angled pieces indicated in the upper left. There's not any visual "what's changed" from the last step, so you have compare the previous step with the current and hunt out the differences.

Oversight Two:
The other problem is the "2x" is very easy to overlook especially when the pieces aren't symmetrical (like two headlights), but "randomly" placed. One may be obvious (and called out visually) while the other may be more obscure.

Both of these problems make it fairly easy to overlook a piece while trudging through the many steps and hundreds of pieces. How about a red outline around each new piece for the step? Or give some opacity to the already placed pieces? Or (a little more busy but) how about a fly-out for every added piece? Nothing is more frustrating than realizing you missed a critical piece 5 steps ago because you overlooked it.

I think we're going to adjust the bricks-to-kit ratio to a more "dad friendly" 80/20.