LEGO Hack-a-thon
Creating a solution in 24 hours, sounds easy right?
Independent
Team Leader
Figma, React
24 hours
July 2024
The LEGO Group gave us 24 hours to create a solution for the following brief:
It can be challenging to select a gift as an adult due to the rapidly changing preferences of children.
Adults nowadays must consider the child’s age, interests, a balance of educational development and entertainment.
Special occasions like birthdays and Christmas add extra pressure to find the perfect gift.
My team created a solution that built upon Lego's existing one. We created a more seamless and consistent design to Lego's Gift-finder, to ensure an optimal user experience for Lego's customers.
Background
While each discipline (data science, UX design and software engineering) had their own deliverables within the solution, we first did some research all together on the problem space, so that we were all on the same page as to what the current gifting behaviours are. We found that:
shoppers are less motivated and more likely to employ effort reducing strategies when choosing gifts
46% of Gen Z used the internet to find gifts
Only 16% of websites provide a good filtering experience with sufficient filtering types available
This made it clear to us that our solution had to focus on reducing the cognitive load and somewhat the pressure that adults feel when buying children gifts.
When crafting the HMW question, we wanted to ensure that it related to Lego's ethos, and how their products combine fun and educational value. We finally settled on:
How might we guide adults to effortlessly choose gifts for children’s birthdays that inspire learning through play?
Because we were under extreme time constraints - we didn't have time to conduct user interviews. We created a proto-persona based on assumptions from our research. As we had done most of our research on Gen Z, it only made sense for our proto-persona to be within that generation as well.
After we understood who our users were, we also wanted to understand the current state of Lego's solution to the problem - the Gift-finder. It was here in the experience map, that we identified areas of opportunity.
So after identifying the areas which we were going to improve, we had to brainstorm ideas, and look for UI inspiration as well. Below you can see some sketches we made, and the inspiration of some elements that we wanted to include or improve.
In the early hours of the morning (because we only had 24h!), we started creating the wireframes for our new and improved Gift-finder!
First. we played around with the order of the steps, and the layout etc and made sure that each design choice was a meaningful one.
We then quickly had to create high-fidelity wireframes (and get some sleep), as our software engineer would have to spend the morning coding the prototype using React.
After completing our solution, we then had to present it infront of 4 judges from The LEGO Group. While nerve-wracking, it was an incredible experience presenting to them, and they provided really valuable feedback.
It was my first time leading a "product design" team, and I really enjoyed it! It was really interesting to see how the three disciplines work together to achieve something, and I liked ensuring that all team members were on the same page. As well as fostering a culture where we could have fun and everyone felt comfortable!
Even if we didn't win, it was a lovely experience to work with my team and The LEGO Group.
More Case Studies:
HMW Question
Brainstorming
Wireframing
Key Takeaways
& Next steps
