New shop.LEGO.com launched today

Well, a completely new look, but wasn't able to navigate once I logged on to my account, just kept freezing on me.
Will try again later.

What's wrong with the old one? This new one just seems all around less usable, everything is far too big, takes up far too much of the screen. It comes across like a bad mobile site. And honestly it looks less legit, everything looks like it came out of a click bait virus ad. I can't help but notice that it has less features too, for example the building instructions link is missing, but hopefully they just havent been added yet

I have to agree with magmafrost: everything is far too big and takes up too much of the screen. I have a gigantic monitor and still had to spend way too much time scrolling around.

Here's the best I can say about it: it's not as bad as the legoeducation.com website rebuild. That one is atrocious and a classic example of someone trying to use web features just because they exist.

I may be different from others, but I don't want to be entertained or wowed by website tricks. I just want to get information fast and with minimal effort.

$0.02

Still the same list of countries, and still no Serbia on the list :(

Ugh the mobile version is awful. It feels like everything is hidden away where I can't see it. Going to respond to survey now.

Have to concur that everything is just far too big. I can only fit 6 sets on the screen at a time. 1/3 of the screen is just white background on either side of the information. The actual photos of the sets are actually quite small with just a lot of wasted space around them. Yes I can zoom out to fit more on the screen but then the words become too small and the pictures indistinct. The real challenge will really come when we all start shopping on it or lego add new items as that was the old site's weekest links (strangely enough). Survey done!

I thought this "Designed for iPad" school of web design had died out already.

It functions, but it does seem to have its problems. Every time the image changes over you're knocked out of the menu for sets by theme to see the new graphic, that's bad design choice right there as it forces you to move quickly on deciding which theme you want to look at before the change over occurs and you are forced to reopen the menu, or scroll back over to trigger the menu as the menu doesn't close, it just hides while the graphic changes on the screen. Why would you even do that?

I didn't mind the scrolling too much, but then again I'm used to it on most other online sites.

I just filled out the survey. Said pretty much exactly the same thing as Bricklunch above. I think the current site is okay. The only thing I would like is to have the same feature as on Brickset, where I could just tap on images in a category to zoom in, instead of having to load a new page for each set to see them better.

I haven't looked at the newly designed site, but I don't see what's wrong about the "old" one.

I filled out the survey as well. Agree with all those who don't like the "iPad" design where everything is too big, a lot of wasted space, endless scrolling, and generally worse usability.

I actually really like the "current" design of Lego LEGO.com. Don't understand why they want to change it at all. There is just no need, is there?

I also found it hard to find what I was looking for. And hell, if you have to endlessly scroll to begin with, why in addition show all those retired products from years past? To again remind one of the annoying fact that we missed something for which we have to resort to the overpriced aftermarket? To have to scroll even more? WTH?
And what's up with some articles showing the price and the button "Add to bag", whereas others don't show the price but offer a button "Shop now", after which you are taken to a new page where the price is shown after all, plus an "Add to bag" button? I don't get the logic.

All in all, a big "thumbs down" on this redesign.

I find the overall design is a tab obnoxious in size, especially the banner on every page.

Also, I'm surprised they put back all the old exclusive sets on the list. What's up with that?

I actually think the current site is almost perfectly set up. Everything is easy to find and makes sense.

The problem with it is it always crashes when there is a sale or a holiday.

@Magmafrost - exactly right. My first thought was 'Unneccesary'. But on reflection I'd like to change that to 'hideous'.

Huge double-banners, enormous drop-down menus with just a handful of scattered options, all wasting my time and screen space with nothing useful whatsoever. Someone really needs to be moved to a different department for a bit of a lie-down.

LEGO - If you are reading, this WILL damage your sales figures.
Reverse it now, while you still can.

I tend to subscribe to the adage that people don't go to website to be entertained, they go for information.

So, what information do I want? Well, I want to see if anything is on sale, I want to see what might be new, and I want to be able to compare different sets or see if certain sets have pieces that I might want so much that I buy the whole set. As a grown-up (at least I play one on TV), I'm sure my wants are different from your typical 8 year-old.

There is another principle in information design that says that one should allow comparisons in space, not in time. What this means is that if I want to compare two things, I should place them where my eyes can see them at the same time; place them collacated in space. The worst thing you can do is force the viewer to look at the sequenced in time, that is, look at one, switch the picture, look at the other one, switch the picture, look at the first one, etc. Much better to put them both on the screen at the same time than to force me to scroll because scrolling will force one off the page to put the other one on the page.

Thus, smaller entries are key, certainly when screen real estate is at a premium. Giving me sets with small pictures, and the price, and the piece count, and the age range, all in a neat series of rows allows me to make the comparisons I seek to make. And keeping things aligned vertically really improves my ability to concentrate on the parameter I am investigating at the moment. Thus, the current design of the site, even though it is not optimal, is preferred over this one.

And a note on screen real estate: get rid of the stuff that doesn't help: all the extra banners and administrative debris that litters the site. People want _content_, not entertainment or legal disclaimers; they want information, not "pop" or "zing", certainly at a shopping site.

Ok, enough of that. Thank you for your time.

I'm happy that everyone above me thinks the same way I do - I was beginning to wonder if I was turning into a grumpy old man. The current design is just fine, the new one is hideous; 2 or 3 stacked giant banners to scroll through to find anything is just silly, but I never subscribed to the newschool web3.5 ideas. Bricklink 2.0 did it way better! Filled out the form, hope it'll help sway them into a different direction still.

Pick a Brick is really hard to use now. The catagories seem randomly ordered. There are only ten results shown but you still have to scroll to see them all. You must scroll quite awhile to find the right category and then scroll back up to see the results.

How do I switch back to the US site?

I guess its inevitable change but not a fan at all. Didn't really mind much about the old site. From those of you who bought it seemed more like a server crashing issue especially at peak times of service. Maybe they should have worked on that.

the new page is worse .. everything got bigger, less articles per page .. the Navigation is bad as before ... not really any improvement :/

As a user of Windows 8.1, I have a deep dislike of anything "designed for iPad" on my computer. And this is no exception... I can't find anything! If the site itself runs better, that's great... but it looks terrible. The USA site hasn't been changed yet, thank God, but the LEGO.com Home page has been like this for months and I still hate it.

I think it's fine. I'm getting tired of the overused "giant, scroll, scroll, scroll" cliche every single site uses now though.

I can still navigate normally which is fine by me. It's even got a pretty cool 'Retired products' section.

I'm from Switzerland and just found the new design when I wanted to check an Order Status.
I played with the new site and completed the survey (see below).

What did you enjoy about your experience?
A little frustrating, but also some pleasant experiences.
But Firefox was many times no more responding for 5-10 seconds, especially with scrolling or when it has a lot of items on a page

Is there any additional feedback you’d like to provide?
I have a 24" display (resolution 1920 x 1200), but I can only see 6 items on a time.
To much banners, far to big. To much space lost. Designed for old people without glasses? I played with the Zoom ctrl+- (4x to see the 10 items on Pick a Brick, 4x for all the Shop Guarantee, 5x for the Recommended for You, 5x to see all product items (18? per pages) on a page, 4x for Features of a product).
The Pick a Brick have been nicely improved, but it no more possible to select how many items I want to see on a page. I do not want to click 142 times on the Next button. They are to much Categories and the Colour Family shows six 'null' entries.
It was also nice to found (DISCOVER) the 679 Retired products, but it is not possible to see all on a page.
The Selections filters are different from the previous Narrow By, but interesting.
Great, the link to the Building Instructions is working.
The EXTRAS is really a nice feature.
I miss the Top Sellers and the Today's Offers on the home page (which could be named a least LEGO and not only 'Homepage'!)
The Search returned 'No results found for ${active}' for 3061 which was found on the US site.
My Wish List is still accessible, but I could not review my Order Status, 'An unexpected error occurred'.
Need some more to do that only 'finishing touches'.

@Lordmoral: Click "Change Region" on the top banner, second from the left.

I'm not entirely bothered by the redesign. It seems to load fairly quickly, and the graphics are nice and clean. The front page's biggest problem for me is that with so little content on screen at once, it's kind of boring, but it's not as much of a maze as the old one. The pages I'd look for most often, like sets, themes, and categories, are still very easily accessible. The only page I can't find from the old site is the Top Sellers page, which I guess I'd miss. However, because of the old front page's disorganized layout, I hardly ever even remember that page exists.

The navigation tools now list "Sets" separately from "Extras" like keychains, books, and home wares. I think this will be extremely well-received since in the past, theme pages as well as the Sales and Deals page would often be cluttered with that sort of stuff when you weren't looking for it. It's now much easier to get a sense of how many actual SETS are available in each theme or category, versus how much gear/"tat" is available. The only disadvantage of this, I suppose, is that fewer people might buy keychains and the like if they're not specifically looking for them, whereas previously it would've been fairly easy to toss a Ninjago keychain in with your other Ninjago purchases.

On the theme/category pages, filtering by age, price, and piece count is now done with drop-down menus rather than the frankly annoying sliders there used to be, and you can now filter sets by average rating (sorting by rating was already an option but filtering by rating is new).

There's now a Discover tab that currently only links to a "Retired Products" page, which is useful for reference if nothing else. I can't help thinking there are other useful links that could be added to the "Discover" tab, like a page for sets that have won awards at Toy Fairs, or a page for sets that were bestsellers the previous year, or a page for all "Coming Soon" products (there's one of those on the old site, but it's obnoxious to try and get to — I only ever manage to find it by plugging in the URL or following a link on another site).

Checking an individual set page, it's much easier to browse images on the new site, which shows you thumbnails of up to twelve images instead of just three on the old site. Zooming is not so intuitive (it's by double-clicking rather than rolling over, and there is no text to indicate this), but it makes viewing the images larger more convenient since you can stay zoomed on a particular part of the set even when you move your cursor, it's in the same large space as the regular size image was instead of the narrow space beside it, and the zoomed image doesn't cover up the other set details.

Unfortunately, the right-side infobox now no longer has useful product details like age range, piece count, item number, and VIP points: you now have to scroll down for those. The share buttons look nicer and MySpace has been replaced with Google Plus — still a site people joke about nobody using, but not QUITE so underused. The set descriptions are in a narrower space, and thus much easier to read than when they stretched all the way across the page. They're also in a larger and easier to read font. The new set pages are pretty solid overall even if I'm not happy with all the ways the contents were redistributed.

The Pick-A-Brick section has a lot of kinks to work out, like its lengthy list of categories. While this is interesting in terms of showing us perhaps the most extensive list of LEGO internal element categories ever disclosed, for shoppers' sake it really ought to hide any category that don't have any parts available. Also, a lot of the color families listed on Pick-A-Brick are erroneously labeled as "null" (however, it is nice that there are more color categories than there used to be, with orange parts now listed separately from brown/tan ones).

Overall there's still a lot of stuff to fine-tune but I like the direction the site is moving in.

I think the true test will be when loads of people want to order at the same time. That has always shown the current site's weaknesses - plus the need to keep clearing cookies all the time to make it work as it should. Hopefully things will stay in the basket at checkout time now.

If they can solve those issues that'll make a lot of users happy.

Did this change affect the Lego Careers site, too? I've been furiously working on a portfolio since the Product Designer position was announced on July 4th. I already had an account with my resume and cover letter, and I was even on the distribution list for new job postings. Now I go in there and find that not only is the Product Designer job posting gone (the deadline was August 12th), but the site is all different and has seemingly forgotten my user profile. Now I feel a bit lost.

That was a horrible experience. If that continues, I will avoid shop.lego.com from now on and just order from other sources. I tend to use lego directly for VIP points and the freebies, but if I have to suffer through that, I think I will have less stress by not accumulating points. And most freebies I don't want anyway. Oh well.

Ugh. I thought we'd already been over this whole Juniorization thing?

Also, for some reason it thinks I am accessing their site from Switzerland, and none of the effort on my part has been effective to address this.

I do NOT like the new site at all. Oversized banners, boxes far too large, not enough information, the list goes on. But even past all that, the real killer is the load times. My internet is not the best, but I can load a couple of minutes ahead when watching a 720p60 Youtube video. So why does the page freeze so often, why does it make Firefox stop responding when all I do is scroll down past a point? Even for a work in progress site this is unacceptable, and it just goes to show how bad the new site is. I can't stand it.

1/10, basic functions are there but overall an atrocious experience. I wrote a... shall we say, "fitting" review in the questionnaire as well.

Haha, it immediately froze after using the categories-button to navigate. That's the lego shop experience, I am used too... :(((

The big question is, will the whole thing continue to collapse under the weight of new product launches and desirable promo events? A pretty car with a crappy engine is still a lemon.

Even with a browser window maximized to fill a 2560 x 1440 screen resolution, the list of themes in the Sets drop-down is too long for the screen height. It really needs to be split into more than one column or have the excessive leading reduced. Also, the list format is not consistent with the icon format of the other main menu item drop-downs. Hopefully this is one of the areas yet to be finalized.

The waving minifigure graphic is just bad design. It draws the eye because it's the only animated element on the page, but reveals itself to be devoid of purpose upon hovering or clicking.

I imagine one of the goals for this redesign was to reduce the amount of information on the front page, but I feel they've gone a bit too far in that direction.

I agree with all the comments above, but it instead of ranting here, let's all take the survey for feedback.

Call me a grumpy old man but that is one big buggy mess. I had an item in my cart so I had to accept changing the price which didn't work. I now have 5 copies in my shopping cart that I can't get rid of.
The filtering is a step back. What was wrong with the sliders? Why do I now have to choose from only 5 predefined price ranges?
Product detail page has half the details beside and half the details below the picture. Hover and zoom no longer works, I now have to double-click to zoom and click and hold to pan.
Hover on the themes button is gone, I now have to click the sets button. The 'view all' button is at the bottom of the page so I now have to scroll down first before I can change the page to all items in one go. And it still doesn't remember my preference to view all items every time.
I could go on. It's badly designed and seriously unfinished.

As Huw mentioned fill out a survey! Complaining here won't certainly get anything done! I have done so.

Well, the entire world is on the Swiss server right now, that won't make it any faster i guess... But a new website was long overdue, so i'm excited!

I just hope TLG's web designers actually read their surveys and implement some of that information before they go on to change shop.Lego.com in other countries! By the sound of things, there is still a lot of adjustment needed.

The current site serves me very well, except when heavy traffic causes it to crash. Improving the system's reliability should be much higher on the list of priorities for a redesign than tinkering with the aesthetics. Sadly, it sounds like that is not the case....

Having now visited the new site, I don't find it a disaster--but I've seen nothing to make me more confident that it will really be much of an improvement. Change for the sake of change is always an annoyance.

Yep, still doesn't work!!!!

Oh boy. I've been waiting for a change but there are a lot of bad things going on here. All the transitions are to slow. The Ajax loading has no loading indication. Everything just feels slower than it should, and it's not a server load thing.

This seems pretty broken right now too (check out Pick-A-Brick!). I hope it's just early in development... it really shouldn't have been pushed out like this. Still seems VERY beta. Had LOTS of feedback for the developers.

I quite like the clean and colourful look, there is too much wasted white space however. Parts of the site don't work at all however it does say they are still adding the finishing touches so hopefully many of the problems will get ironed out.
Personally, I had no problem with the old site, if it ain't broke why fix it?

I don't understand the comments about the "old"/current site crashing. I have been buying on LEGO.com for years and all year round, even on so called "busy" days, but I have never experienced a crash or other problems. Ok, so load times were not always great, but every site experiences slow load times sometime, even brickset.com ;-)
And don't even start about load times at bricklink.com ...

Since LEGO.com do not deliver to my country (Slovenia) I realy do not care how it looks. Old or new...usless.

^^ Somebody before me said: "When form is more important than function." - I was *forced* to use new brickset, new bricklink so its time for new LEGO.com site. I pray for improoved functionality rather then new design and you know what I mean...

Find it a little too large and the resizing mechanism not right. however, I am not a fan of the current site ( I have soft spot for it, because I know it so well) but I LOVE change and I think they are heading in the right direction. Visually, it is bright and happy looking and when they improve functionality, I think it will provide the foundation for a potentially excellent site.

There are certainly issues, hence feedback via the survey, which I have indeed filled out (some current features missing, which I hope will be re-added).

However, personally quite excited !

They poorly attempted to copy Apple, when they should have copied Amazon.

It's a mess for me. It freezes every ten seconds (literally) and it's impossible for me to change my region back to the US. It's permanently stuck in Switzerland. IT goes to a "Change shipping country to United States" page, which continuously refreshes so that it's impossible to leave that page.

@Gremer, i had the same problem. I've opened it in Internet Explorer (instead of Chrome), and then i could change my country back to my own.

TLG makes great toys, but they need to fire everyone who wants to sell and ship them to customers. I've spent thousands and thousands of dollars on shop.lego.com and the experience is by far the worst of any website I've ever bought items from. The shopping cart breaks all the time - one can not 'save for later' most of the time. Searching for items and changing the number shown on each page will often cause the home page to reload instead. The site itself often gets lost and returns me to the home page if I click a link it didn't feel like feeding to me.

And then, no tracking info for many of the orders and most of the time the shipments have to be returned because they are packed so poorly and damaged so much. It's been super frustrating for years, and every time they ask me to take the survey, I tell them, in detail, of all the issues I have trying to purchase their items. The nearest LEGO Store is over 2.5 hours away from me, so I don't get the chance to visit there very often. Thankfully they will ship for me, and they pack things *way* better than LEGO.com ever has.

If their shopping cart was improved [one could change quantities or 'save for later' or apply VIP points and have that stick, and add the free bonus item when it is advertized on their home page and not 8 hours later, when someone shows up for work], and have their search engine and product pages remember what the customer is asking for and load the pages the customer wants instead of resetting and going to the main LEGO.com home page, that would be awesome.