Lego Ideas Updated: Better Search & A Major New Milestone
Posted by rock99rock,
Lego Ideas has implemented some big changes this week regarding search, milestones and targets. According to the blog post, this is the second of three planned updates for Lego Ideas this fall. These updates are based on surveys, comments, user experience testing, and discussions with fans at LEGO events. Here's a brief overview of some of the search changes:
-
New Discover page filter for Project Category lets you choose to view only “original” projects, only projects based on third-party intellectual property (IP), or both. Choose “Original” if you don’t want to see projects based on movies, games, brands, etc. Original will show you projects based on existing LEGO playthemes like Ninjago, Friends, or Classic Space, as well as all those completely original concepts by LEGO Ideas members. These are filtered based on how members classify their own projects when asked about IP before submitting. If you happen to see a project incorrectly categorized, let us know by email while we work our way through the new filtered lists ourselves to check for any mistakes.
-
New Discover page Trending This Week filter. This works just like Trending this Month, but for the week.
-
Discover page Staff Picks view now sorts projects by Staff Pick date. This should be more intuitive for frequent visitors. Before, this view sorted by the date the project was posted.
-
Goodbye, Search page, hello Discover page. We “fixed” the search bar in the site header to load the Discover page which allows you to filter and sort your results.
-
Member search moves to the Community page. We improved the Leaderboard so it now behaves like the Discover page; you can search for members and sort results by several parameters.
-
Tags are now clickable! Open a project and scroll down to the tags. Click one and the Discover page will load with the tag added to the filter.
These changes are most welcome, and will help streamline the search process when looking for Ideas to support going forward. With 10-20 new projects submitted per day, supporters need all the options they can to find projects they’d like to support.
Now onto the Milestones, where one of the biggest changes we have witnessed to Lego Ideas took place a few days ago:
-
New projects will now have 60 days to reach 100 supporters. Once they reach that milestone, they’ll receive a one-year boost. The six-month boosts at 1,000 and 5,000 remain the same.
-
Existing projects with less than 100 supporters have had their Days Left clock adjusted to 60. We’ve left an Official Comment on the affected projects letting them know.
This is huge news. The blog goes into detail as to why they came to this change, and it's all very logical.
- The most successful Ideas projects—those that reach 5,000 and 10,000 supporters—share one thing in common: every one of these projects posted since LEGO Ideas launched in April 2014 reached 100 supporters in their first 30 days. No project that has gone on to reach 5k or 10k supporters has taken longer. It could very well be that the “wisdom of crowds” is the best quality filter of all. We’ve decided to let you tell us which projects are high quality by doing what you do best: supporting your favorite projects.
The change affected 58% of current projects (nearly 3200 of 5500), setting their “Days Left” counter to 60 days. It should really help change the landscape of Ideas. It’s unfortunate for those that have had many months removed (with recent submissions up to a year), but this change may be the drastic move that Ideas had to make in order to bring back those who have lost interest due to the issues that are now being addressed.
It will help the general population weed through the pile with a bit more ease. As an avid Ideas hunter for my Fresh Ideas article, I must still rummage through the most recent submissions that still fit within that 60 days window. In this case however, it is great news that strides are being made to make the site more navigable. What do you think? Is this a move in the right direction? Let us know in the comments.
33 likes
26 comments on this article
I saw the 60 day change yesterday. I have to say, it makes a lot of sense and good to see that the data backs it up as no decent idea would have been lost within the 60 days.
The update is a nessecerity. If a project doesn´t make it to 100 supporters in 2 months, it won´t come to the review stage, if it so had a year to do that. This update remove most of the projects which just "take place" in the database. That´s a little sad, though.
My projects only have 50 supporters, and they've been up for about a year. It looks like I'll have to repost them. :/
Another change they should implement is the ability to recognize similar characters, such as letters with diacritic marks. One exeample (not my project, of course): if you type in Tower of Belem, the (awesome) Tower of Belém (Lisboa Torre de Belém) project doesn't pop-up in results.
This is an issue for non-english/american sites or names...
As for sharing one's thoughts here on Brickset, I feel I could just copy-paste my comment from the blog:
* * *
Yes, yes!! Finally!!
Many people, myself included, have been waiting for so long a rule like this early 100 supporter milestone.
This should have many positive effects: not only the site gets cleaned up from tons of "hopeless" stuff, but also this seriously points out the necessity of QUALITY & PROMOTION with projects. Previously many people could just post all sorts of mediocre stuff without enough interest in Q&P, but this change of rules should serve as an effective incentive in that regard!
After all, LEGO Ideas is NOT about simple sharing your stuff. This place is meant to be a dedicated platform to study new product concepts. This new milestone rule totally serves this basic purpose of LEGO Ideas.
There is simply no point whatsoever to have the site clogged up by thousands of projects which will never reach 10k (or even 1k) due to lack of special eye-catching awesomeness, so to speak. (Note: this does NOT mean all projects failing to reach 100 are bad creations; they can be good MOCs, but here on Ideas you simply have to create something special that stands out from the crowd!)
For people who simply want to share their creations, there are tons of websites for that. :)
Very, very good change to LEGO Ideas. I hope this will encourage countless new most talented creators out there to join and create projects of true potential and promise.
* * *
@pedrojpinto That is a good point. Hopefully someday that can be implemented, even if the change affects few projects.
@pedrojpinto: you make a worthy point!
Unless you have already been in contact with the Ideas team, I recommend sending them email about the issue:
support.ideas @LEGO.com
I know that this will never be implemented but is would like to be able to support a project from the discover page. It would make supporting much easier and quicker, but it would also lend to people judging the project just by the picture, and people supporting every single project. Oh a well.
I completely agree with the 60 days to reach 100 supporters. There are too many projects that get approved and make searching for quality ideas and sets a chore. Now they just need to tighten up the requirements to get in based on how the set looks. How about with digital models make sure the rendering is not through LDD, but instead something nicer like Bluerender.
It was badly in need of a crud filter. Let's hope this does the trick.
60 day time limit! Yes! So every half hearted bad idea will be quickly filtered from the system, rather than take up space. Awesome!
Great article Rock99Rock. Thanks for posting it.
These improvements are necessary so as to clean up and filter the the Ideas project database. I fully support the reasoning behind the changes. I wonder what the third update will involve?
I just hope this doesn't affect any of my future LEGO Ideas projects.
[LEGO Stratego coming soon!]
^^ @FlagsNZ Thank you. I was wondering the same thing. I didn't want to speculate too much and get my hopes up :) I've written LEGO previously with suggestions to improve the search and some more requests over a year ago. I think now would be a good time to implement a "Milestone View". As in, "Show projects with 100-1000 votes", and/or "Show projects with 1000-5000 votes" and so forth. If this update is any indication, the 3rd should be a welcome surprise.
I think this is brilliant. There are so many projects that don't stand a chance at reaching 10k. As someone else said, it is not that they are 'bad'. A project needs to be well presented, not just well made. I think it will help clean up LEGO Ideas and make it not as cluttered. :)
I know it will be hard on some people but this is something necessary, this is a product page after all. We have a lot of MOC sharing places such as Flickr and the own Brickset Forums.
This is very sensible and will hopefully make IDEAS both more navigable and more useful.
Hmm.. at least the IDEAS team seem to admit that the site is full of hopeless dreck.
Unfortunately, instead of seizing the chance to apply some sensible triage themselves, the IDEAS boys have taken the cowardly step of delegating the doling of death sentences to us. Having noticed this week's submissions (and why would I look again at months-old sets?), I note the same low ratio of reasonable over rubbish.
The upshot of this "100 votes in 60 days" criterion is that there will still be the same quantity of snecking toot, but it'll be refreshed more quickly. No real change, then.
I'd like to see the ability to filter projects by size. I like supporting little $5/10-scale projects - they're less ambitious but they can reach a large crowd. I'm not as interested in $70+ projects at all, because I simply can't promise to buy them, which is the entire point of the IDEAS model.... not to mention most of the massive sets AFOL's want usually get vetoed by LEGO for those very reasons and concerns.
I might've gone for 90 days over 60 myself, but I know most Brickset members are sick of the kid-ish builds and want to see the cool stuff, and this obviously eliminates the kiddie stuff quicker.
@SpidermanLM339 isn't the reason for the changes to reduce the clutter and get rid of the clutter of unsupported projects? Lego analysis would dictate that your projects no matter how good they are have no chance of ever making the cut.
^ Couldn't agree more. "Oh, my project didn't make the cut so I'll repost it time and time again until it does!" Utterly pointless.
I'm very much for the new limit. There is so much clutter on Ideas currently, with so many hopeless projects, that one can hope this new rule finally sets the focus back on quality again.
This makes a lot of sense.
However, I hate the new rule that if a project is rejected at any stage, LEGO still claim all exploitation rights over it for 3 years, instead of returning it to the designer. That's unfair.
We needed a rule like that so the all planes and cars made out of 20 2x4 bricks won't linger.
I am quite happy with the new milestone, however, the biggest problem I have found with the site is that projects just get lost in the system. Unless you are 'popular this week' or a staff pick people don't see your project. I noticed when using 'Discover' and 'most supported' that the number of projects being displayed appeared in the browser address box. Changing this to 'n:1500' displays 1500 projects from the Hulkbuster to projects with only 90 supporters.
It takes 30 seconds or so to display the list and the list doesn't redisplay if you look at a project and go back to the list. I scroll through the list and make a note of any projects I like, then hunt them down individually to support.
Very happy to see there is a way to filter out the IP-based projects!