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Have you ever played with Legos as a team-building exercise?

I worked on a huge digital transformation project a few years ago. In the beginning stages of the project we all - around 200 of us - did team-building activities. A big component of these activities was introducing play into the activities, which made a lot of sense as we would be tasked with building a large piece of software. Creativity was being encouraged, as it would be a life-saver later on.

One of these games was to break us up into teams of five with the object of building a small city using Legos. We were using my favorite Lego “sets”, the bulk sets of random Lego pieces sold by the pound. Using these sets went a long way to challenge my creativity when I was younger when I wanted to build houses instead of playing house. I was looking forward to this exercise.

Little did I know that one of my teammates would turn this round of Lego play into Who’s The Most Aggressive. We started by sorting the random Legos into piles, sorted by shape and size. After that, this guy, another designer like me, didn’t want any of the rest of us touching his creation. “I just won a prize in an adult Lego competition,” he said. So he proceeded to build his version of the city all by himself.

The rest of us did a little strategy of things that a city would need - hospitals, bridges, buses, and so on - and then individually worked on bits of infrastructure that we all agreed to do separately.

20 minutes later, the group of us reconvened. Lego Prize Guy had his city “done”, a very nice high-rise style apartment building, and had even created some green space. It indeed was a nice-looking example of random Lego architecture. The rest of us started to ask him questions.

“How would people get there? By bus or by car?”

“How would people feed themselves? Would they plant things in the green space or go to a store?”

“Where would they go if they got sick?”

And so on. Lego Prize Guy recognized immediately that in his enthusiasm to build the best thing he could, he missed a bunch of requirements by going off alone and doing his thing. He even apologized to the rest of us right then and there.

In under an hour, playing with Legos taught us all that going off and doing our own thing was not helpful. But designers do this all the time, they go right into screens without the information they need to do their jobs.

It’s truly shocking how much early-stage design work is guesswork that gets thrown out.

Applying object-oriented UX techniques gives designers the information they need to do their jobs well, including:

• the main navigation items
• user-focused labels for action buttons
• a prioritized list of what goes into an MVP
• a list of filters that are needed to navigate the system
• and so much more

If we prioritized getting the right information early in the process, in place of the usual design guesswork, development teams would have a much better understanding of what they will build.

Does this resonate with you? Do you want to find out more about object-oriented techniques that can save your team time and energy? Let’s have a conversation.