Don’t sort Lego by colour

Jason Leung

Imagine somehow having a time machine, going back in time, and meeting your younger self. Would you channel age and wisdom into life-changing advice, or would you laugh uncontrollably at your former fashion choices? Among many possibilities, I know what I would tell five year-old me: don’t sort Lego by colour!

The Lego findability problem

Before I got my first home computer, aged 12, I spent a significant chunk of my childhood playing with Lego. While I still remember a few specific sets, I have a clearer memory of the multi-sectioned plastic crates that stored by growing collection of bricks. More specifically, I remember kneeling on my bedroom floor searching through one section of a crate for a specific size and shape of brick.

Finding bricks sometimes took a long time, usually when searching for small or rare bricks.They would hide in the bottom of the crate, under layers of larger bricks. Five year-old me failed to consider alternative brick organisation strategies.

Sorting by size

I recently regained control of the family Lego, and wanted to repackage a few small sets for young relatives. First, I obviously had to reorganise the unsorted bricks, before recreating the first build experience.

I now understood the advantages of a separate container for each brick size and shape.

1. One container per size and shape gives you the option of many more containers than the number of colours, so you can narrow down your search more at the first step.
2. When all bricks in a container have the same size and shape, bigger bricks don’t hide smaller ones.
3. When you search a container for a specific colour, you don’t need to see the whole brick to see its colour, which the container much faster to browse.

Sorting by size instead of colour gives optimises for finding a specific brick with less effort. By comparison, sorting a brick collection by colour makes about much sense as organising a bookcase by colour: aesthetically inspired, perhaps, but impractical.

Findability

Similar findability problems emerge in other contexts, such as clothes in a shop. Sorting related products by price makes it possible to start in roughly the right place, before browsing by more visually-obvious differences, such as product type and colour.

Information architecture goes wrong when we group things by the wrong characteristic. The most obvious categorisation makes things hard to find when everything within a category looks the same. Counter-intuitively, you don’t want too much similarity between items in the same category.

A focus on findability shifts perspective from appearance to experience: what someone wants to do instead of what they see. We emphasise this when we talk about user-experience design instead of user-interface design, and when we talk about problems before we talk about solutions.