
The UX of Lego Interface Panels - george_cave
https://www.designedbycave.co.uk/2020/LEGO-Interface-UX/
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codeulike
In my day (80s space Lego) we just had the one that looks like a screen of
text with 3 buttons on the right. And the one that just had coloured
rectangular buttons. And that was enough to run our space stations and LL928s.
We didn't need any of that fancy stuff they've got now.

~~~
rcarmo
SPACESHIP!

(sorry, couldn't help it)

But yes, I recall that very same brick - I had a bunch of them, always thought
we needed more variety.

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mcv
We had them too. First the grey ones, later fancy blue ones!

There were also button panels on flat 2x1s. This article seems to have
forgotten those.

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uxamanda
Graphing the differences in the pieces on a LEGO panel was very clever!

This article also reminded me to "zoom out" on a design. If it's super
confusing at that level, it probably still needs work. The ventilator example
suffers from this a bit. It is really nice to have the instructions inline
with the dials, but the visual design makes it look more complicated. If you
imagined the LEGO-version, it would have more symmetrical color blocks and
alignment. I don't mean to pick on them too harshly, sounds like it was made
and distributed in record time!

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ocdtrekkie
The nostalgia this post hinges on is amazing. I remember every one of the
example pieces they show here. And what's amazing is many of them you'll find
showing up in LEGO sets today. It's pretty rare LEGO makes single-use pieces,
even really obscure pieces end up showing up randomly elsewhere.

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JorgeGT
Same! Thanks OP for the trip down the memory lane. I even remember which sets
I got them from, for instance the yellow one with the "sonar" I got from this
submarine:
[https://lego.brickinstructions.com/en/lego_instructions/set/...](https://lego.brickinstructions.com/en/lego_instructions/set/6175/Crystal_Explorer_Sub_)
and the grey "consolidated interface" one with this jet:
[https://lego.brickinstructions.com/en/lego_instructions/set/...](https://lego.brickinstructions.com/en/lego_instructions/set/6331/Patriot_Jet)

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jsmith99
> I’ve no idea what all the valves in the picture below do, but I bet they
> don’t all open things that relate to each other.

Disappointingly, the picture is just a bank of water meters for an apartment
building (possibly in Israel?). It does convey the message though: they are
unrelated because each relates to a separate apartment but are all in one
place so a inspector can read them from outside the building.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Reminds me of a similar setup I had in the basement of the apartment building
I lived in: there were groups of valves on the water pipes running along the
ceiling, and on each handle there was a tag with apartment numbers written on
it.

This was essentially use-case organization, because the use case was, "in case
of a leak upstream of your in-apartment valve, go to the basement, find the
valve that controls the line you're attached to, shut it off, and go inform
other people on the same line what's going on".

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kanobo
If you liked this article, I highly recommend the book 'Make it So', it's a
review of the UX and UI of the interfaces in popular science fiction tv shows
and movies.

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george_cave
Thank you, I've just looked it up and messaged the author now!

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victornomad
Thanks for the article, its superb! Could you share some literature as a
follow-up?

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george_cave
I don’t know how deep into interface design you want to go, but User Friendly
by Cliff Kuang is a superb intro and includes lots of anecdotes like the B-17
bomber and Ford Lincoln stories.

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victornomad
thx for the suggestion! I'm very much into interface design but didn't do much
of physical interfaces. I guess it is more related to industrial design than
the typical UX / interaction designer, it seems...

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ajarmst
Nice article with an interesting approach. Assuming the poster is the author,
the word ‘irradiate’ in the caption in the B17 photo confused me, although it
did lead to some interesting speculation. Did you mean ‘eradicate’ and your
spellchecker went rogue?

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java-man
Perfectly fine meaning #2:

To shed light on; illuminate.

irradiate ir·ra·di·ate (ĭ-rādē-āt) v. ir·ra·di·at·ed, ir·ra·di·at·ing,
ir·ra·di·ates v. tr.

To expose to radiation. To treat with radiation: irradiate farm produce so as
to destroy bacteria.

To shed light on; illuminate.

To manifest in a manner suggesting the emission of light; radiate: irradiate
goodness.

v. intr. Archaic

To send forth rays; radiate.

To become radiant.

[Latin irradiāre, irradiāt-, to illuminate : in-, on; see in-2 + radiāre, to
shine; see radiate.]

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george_cave
Thank you both! Yes, I'm the author. So you were correct, I had intended it to
read eradicate but actually I really appreciate java-man's definition help, so
I think I'll just leave it as it is now :).

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fermienrico
I wish this article actually ditched Legos and used actual examples from
existing UIs. There is something to be said about fighter jet cockpits,
avionics controls, understanding of haptics in older cars, power plant control
boards and subway control rooms, crane operator interface, bulldozer UI, CNC
machine HMI and a whole bunch of UI systems that exist out side of consumer
space.

For some reason (I blame sci-fi authors and their vision of future), consumer
space is eroding rapidly with touch screens. Consumers will eat up marketing
bullshit when it is wrapped in a scifi wrapper, with "Now a touchscreen
interface!". This is sadly eroding into things like professional
oscilloscopes, and even cockpits!

They're cheap, easily reconfigurable (this is a bug, not a feature) and it
makes the bean counters happy - "Oh you mean the $48 BOM can be reduced to
$7.50 with one touch screen and 1 UI software contractor for 4 months! _And_
we can market it as a cool thing without users noticing? Holyshit, you're
promoted."

That said, iPhone is nice. It is rare exception, I don't know how Steve Jobs
saw this, but this is perhaps his genius. iPhone + touchscreen interface
totally makes sense. Blackberry folks flaunted their physical keyboards and
yet, iPhone won. This frankly surprises me. If it was year 2005, I would have
bet on Blackberry over iPhone. Everybody did.

~~~
george_cave
Thanks for the nice thoughts. I'm a huge fan of all of the interfaces you
describe from industrial and commercial applications. I've written previously
about my concerns with the touchscreen dominance and the poor UX impact it can
have. My day job is to design physical interfaces for all manner of automotive
and consumer applications and you could say I specialise in the non-
touchscreen design parts.

Regarding the LEGO references, this was just a light hearted look at the
problem from a different perspective :).

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java-man
Please give us an example of the interface you designed (or one you are
especially proud of)!

~~~
george_cave
So the things I'm most proud of aren't quite launched yet, but I work right
now on a lot of electric mobility projects. Something like a charger for an
electric car is especially fascinating because you have none of the cues of
typical car refuelling (smell, sound, vibration) and you can create an
entirely new metaphor and language around how that charging experience plays
out with light, sound, haptic...

Often you'll have a client who says "I want my product to be smart and
connected so I need a 5 inch touch screen on the front of the box" and its fun
to show them an entirely different approach that delivers both a better user
experience and also becomes a key differentiator for their brand.

You can see a few (older) things that I've worked on at my employer's website
here: [https://kiska.com/](https://kiska.com/)

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Aardwolf
I'm glad that road safety requires at least "some" sanity in the UI of cars.

Too bad mobile phones don't have such requirements, so there you have to guess
all the time whether in this week's version of an app you'll have to swipe
left/right/up/down for unmarked features, long press or short press, use the
three dots or the hamburger? Will tapping this phone number allow to see info
or will it immediately start calling the person? Do the icons designed for
flat looks rather than distinguishable and informative even tell?

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beenBoutIT
These interface panels would look better with the careful addition of subtle
raised features and indentations to accentuate the screen printing.

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incanus77
Dang, stole my thunder. I was just pondering doing a blog post series on these
exact panels as I have finally started sorting my collection after 40 years
and found at least 10 of these that I have.

I may still do a series based on the real-world tech that these were modeled
after in their time periods. Some of them are super-fun retro.

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defterGoose
This is great. I feel like I'm seeing more and more things modeled in LEGO,
and it makes me happy that the community is cross-generational and growing.

On a side note, he picked some of my personal favorites from my childhood in
the 90s. The 1x2 tile QWERTY keyboard also found its way into more than it's
fair share of things I made.

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JKCalhoun
I absolutely love that someone has this much free time and this kind of
tongue-in-cheek obsession.

It was tongue-in-cheek, right?

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peacefulhat
I don't see much of an objective pattern for placement along the organized-
chaotic axis

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zachrose
To me that axis seems more legible-illegible than organized-chaotic. The
panels on the top of the chart "read" as buttons and levers and things I'm
already familiar with. The panels at the bottom have oddly particular layouts
that don't seem familiar.

To see a 2x2 of order-chaos and legible-illegible as applied to brands, check
out the K-Hole Brand Anxiety Matrix:
[http://khole.net/issues/03/](http://khole.net/issues/03/)

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WalterGR
Are you a LEGO collector? Or how did you acquire all these panels?

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george_cave
I bought them all through BrickLink.com, you can search for and select
individual bricks you want to buy. I think it took about 5 or 6 separate
orders to different suppliers to get a good range.

~~~
fit2rule
As a synthesiser designer, I'd like to thank you for the effort required to
document this process and for sharing your fine conclusions.

Now do a Fitts' Law analysis! :)

Seriously though, your collection is pretty neat. My mind wanders at the
thought of putting a synthesiser-generator around the collection of 'fake'
panels, such that they end up actually doing something .. if there were a way
to use colors as layers, could maybe even use that as a hinter for an
automatic signal flow, hmm...

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aasasd
So fitting that this is set in all-caps Futura-like typeface for the headers
and pretty grotesque Source Sans. It's like I'm reading something from ‘2001’.

