BrickLink

BrickLink was a global marketplace for LEGO products and aims to empower the creativity of adult fans of LEGO (AFOL). BrickLink celebrated its 20th anniversary by hosting a 20 Days of BrickLink event to highlight milestones and members from the past and present while looking toward the future. I was asked by a project team to help with the UX of the story submission.

Overview

Challenge

Shows appreciation and celebrate the BrickLink community by creating a campaign that allows them to showcase their passion for LEGO®. Recap how far the site and community has come and what the future for BrickLink would look like.

Solution

Design a feature to showcase BrickLink user’s stories and allow users to support the story. 

Design weekly BrickLink trivia where winners would be rewarded.

Research

It was important to understand what type of content we wanted to showcase. The theme for the 20 Days of BrickLink event was “Past, Present, and Future”. The content surrounding this theme helped us plan for a more cohesive and organized campaign. Once the project team finalized the theme and structure for the campaign, we were able to design a UX flow to fit the content.

Each week consisted of 5 types of content

Define & Ideate

Brainstorm

After the team decided on content for each specific sub-themes, I had a quick, remote brainstorming session with the project lead. We collaborated easily and drew our ideas in real-time using Microsoft Teams’ whiteboard feature. She laid out all possible rough formats for planned content. While considering that there was a small window to design, develop, and deliver the project, I sketched a few flexible types of posts that would accommodate a variety of content.

BrickLink Trivia

The goals of the weekly BrickLink trivia were to increase community engagement and reward members for being a part of the community. Based on the knowledge that our members are competitive, we decided to include a leaderboard at the end of every week’s challenge. Since our community members are located all over the world, we had to come up with the most fair way to rank members. After discussing the feasibility with developers, ranking was based on correct answers, date submitted, and duration.

The challenge was hidden until the member clicks START and the timer begins. As soon as the member completes the challenge, the member must click SUBMIT to complete the challenge and the timer will end. Due to the limitations on obtaining merchandise on time due to COVID19, we decided it was best to leave the giveaway as a surprise for when we were ready to send physical products.

Member stories

Prior to the launch of the campaign, members were encouraged to share their BrickLink moment stories using a submissions page. We thought it would be great content. To benefit our current and future members, we kept this enriched content on our site after the campaign concluded. We created a new page showcasing all stories that would be later linked from the BrickLink’s about page. Not knowing how many submissions we would receive, I planned for a variety of scenarios:

• Small limited amount of stories

• Uneven distribution of stories between the weeks

• Plenty of stories

Stories may contain:

• Title

• Max character limit of 1500

• Image, video, or a link to an image or video (optional)

Prototype & Design Review

Medium Fidelity Wireframes

Wireframes of the weekly stories designed on Sketch App with annotations.

Design review

We invited the front-end and back-end developers to review our sketches to make sure it was feasible and that the features would not increase development time. We agreed to allow members to only react (heart, thumbs up, etc) to a post instead of commenting, since implementing comments would increase the development time.

Final Design

The 20 Days of BrickLink campaign was live until the end of 2020. The following prototype walks you through browsing member stories on desktop and mobile.

Metrics

How many story submissions did we receive? 

• 117 user stories were submitted prior to the launch of the campaign

• 158 total stories submitted at the end of submission intake period

• 90% of submission received engagements