Over the summer our development team have been busy on their continued quest to refine and enhance the LEGO Ideas experience from several angles; some updates being more exciting and visible to all members than other updates. So today we're happy to announce some of the changes that you're likely to notice the next time you login.
The updates come as a result of lots of great user feedback as well as our own internal development roadmap and vision for the LEGO Ideas platform. That being said, we want to thank everyone for their continued constructive feedback. By all means, keep it coming!
So let's dive into the changes and feel free to let us know in the comments what you think!
Explainer Pages
Over the past year we've expanded the definition of what LEGO Ideas is. It's not only about Product Ideas any more, but your creative ideas overall. In the past, our How It Works pages and general explainer pages have been very focused on Product Ideas, so we've revamped this so that you can get a clearer picture of all the challenges you can participate in on LEGO Ideas. We've also revamped the page that details specifically how Product Ideas works, as it requires a little more explanation than the simpler Contests and Activities.
Check out the new explainer pages for How It Works and Product Ideas.
Product Idea Submit Flow
We've also been making some significant changes to the way you submit Product Ideas and this is, personally, what I'm most excited to share with you. First of all, we've simplified and streamlined the submission process and done away with some of the clutter. Hopefully this will help you focus on what's important - the content of your Product Idea that you're submitting. We've also updated the image upload and cropping functionality.
More noteworthy however, is the first step of this new Submit Flow - the Intellectual Property (IP) Question. As you know, LEGO Ideas welcomes submissions based on intellectual properties (designs copyrighted by someone else, i.e. movies, bands, real-world buildings, vehicles, etc), however there are many IPs, which we've already been able to evaluate over the years, that we don't allow as they either:
- Overlap with currently commercialised LEGO products (i.e. Star Wars, Ferrari, etc)
- Have already been commercialised through LEGO Ideas (i.e. Beatles Yellow Submarine, Voltron, etc)
- Don't fit the LEGO Brand (i.e. Game of Thrones or Call of Duty, etc)
- Contain a known license conflict that prevent us from commercialising the IP (i.e. Monopoly, Transformers, etc).
It's always been a bit challenging for members to know which IPs we allow and don't allow, so we're bringing more visibility to this now by allowing you to look up an IP and get an immediate response about whether we allow it or not, or if we haven't evaluated it before. This way, we hope to remove some of the frustrations members have experienced of spending time building something for LEGO Ideas and going through the submission process - only for it to be denied by our moderation team due to the IP in question.
Please be aware that LEGO Ideas maintains an even stricter policy than the rest of the LEGO Group on which intellectual properties are allowed to be submitted to the platform. An IP that may be denied via LEGO Ideas for any reason, may well still be considered internally by the LEGO Groups’ design teams in their regular product development process.
It's worth noting that it's still a work in progress and we plan further updates to this, including providing more precise feedback on why an IP is not allowed.
Product Idea Statistics
Another incredibly exciting new development that we're introducing is Product Ideas Statistics and is a feature available to all members who have submitted a Product Idea (only the person who submitted the Product Idea can see this information). Our long-term goal is for you to be in even more control of your Product Idea and understand the ins and outs of your promotional efforts even better, so that you can spend more time on what works, and less on what doesn't.
For now though, we're introducing two basic graphs for you to keep track of your supporters: Total support over time as well as Support by day. We know that some of our power users have been keeping track of their supporters manually, so this should hopefully make it easier for you to get the overview you need, for instance by seeing spikes on the "Support by day" graph you can correlate that to a certain action you've taken or a social media post or similar to understand what has had an impact.
It's still early days for this tool, so we still have work to do and look forward to your response to it.
Themes/Tags
We've also worked on making "Themes" more powerful, so that it's easier for you to discover more content that you love!
When we first introduced Themes, they were linked only to one tag. For instance, space only linked to the submissions that had included the tag "space", meaning things like space ship or rocket did not feature in those results. With the update, each theme now is built upon multiple relevant tags, which we'll continue to build upon. For instance, the theme "Cars" would now include submissions tagged with car, sport car, race car, and more.
Additionally, we've now made it a requirement to add at least 1 tag (maximum 10 tags) to your Product Idea submission to improve categorisation and discoverability of your submission. This means you'll have to focus your tags on those that are super relevant to your idea. The tags field has also gotten a lift in terms of providing suggested tags that might give you inspiration. For instance, if you write "car" as your first tag, you'll receive additional relevant suggestions such as "vehicle", "wheel", and so on.
Activities
Over the last couple of months you've no doubt become acquainted with Activities - a lightweight and informal challenge that runs on a weekly basis. We've been running it in Beta, but as of today we're rolling it fully into the LEGO Ideas experience. Hurray!
Beyond this we'll also be starting to test smaller, fun activities such as quick quizzes or polls. Below you can see how a quick quiz might look. Sometimes we'll also use this form of input to gather quick information about new features in development, so that we know what to prioritise. It'll give us a better understanding of what the community desires. Stay tuned for more on this!
Let us know your feedback
Did you know that you can always send us feedback about what you think doesn’t work or how you envision LEGO Ideas could change for the better?
To consolidate and get a better overview of all your feedback, we’ve added a new feature to our support portal (https://legoideas.uservoice.com/). The “I suggest you” feature allows you to:
- Submit an idea for improving the LEGO Ideas experience
- Vote for and comment on improvement ideas that other members have already submitted
Instead of sending us your ideas for improvements or feature requests via email or in blog comments (you’re still welcome to do so of course), we’d prefer if feedback such as this is made via the “I suggest you” feature. By voting for your favourite ideas you give us an indication of what concerns you or what you’re longing for the most, so that we can investigate how feasible it is for us to implement this.
By
hasanjensen