Why you had trouble signing up for the LEGO Monthly Mini Build Yesterday

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I had another post scheduled for this morning, but after all the emails I received yesterday, I felt I should share what I found out. I received several emails from readers shortly after the LEGO Monthly Mini Build signup started yesterday morning. As it turns you guys had trouble signing up for the mini build.

So a little backstory… In August, LEGO soft launched a redesign of the website in Switzerland. Readers of The Brick Blogger got early notification on the website redesign. LEGO asked they check out the site and were invited to comment on the redesign. I haven’t followed the redesign saga; however, I can see from a BrickSet post that LEGO launched the design worldwide on September 1st. Fans weren’t happy with the new changes.

In addition, they changed how you go about signing up for the LEGO Monthly Mini Build. Unfortunately, they didn’t make any comments about it or add redirects for those people who have bookmarked or refer to that specific URL (like I do on this blog) on a monthly basis. Instead, to register, you had to jump through a number of hoops to get to the form.

One of my readers (thank you Marne!) was kind enough to share the process LEGO expected you to go through in order to register. This was after spending over an hour on the phone with LEGO trying to signup for the event (bless your heart):

Instead of going to the shop.lego.com url, you were expected to go to store.lego.com.
Once at the store website, you needed to lookup your specific store.
When the specific store page loaded, then you needed to go to the Store News & Events section on the page.
Finally, once you found the monthly mini build blurb, you needed to click on the More Info button to finally get to the registration page.

I believe this has always been a path to get to the monthly mini build; however, due to the number of clicks needed to get to the form, I always jumped people right to the form itself.

Apparently, whomever redesigned the LEGO website thought this process was fine. I suspect LEGO skipped hiring the services of a website usability specialist. If they hired one, they would have NEVER got rid of that link like that. A quick search of their analytics would have shown them the amount of traffic they receive to that link each month was large enough to cause a ruckus when not redirected. (Sorry – got a little techie there…)

Instead, when you went to the link yesterday morning, what you found was 404 error… A broken page.

As the morning went on, it seems LEGO realized the big mistake. I suspect a number of people called customer support trying to figure out how to register for the event. LEGO immediately put their website development team to work. They made the original link go to a page with a button for you to click to sign-up.

I actually saw them build the page as I continued to refresh during that time period. However, since I didn’t know the whole story I didn’t grab any screenshots. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure what my readers were talking about. By the time I went to the site, I could, of course, access the page since LEGO already had the Sign Up button present. This happened all around the 11:30am EST time period.

And now you know the reason why you had so much trouble registering for the LEGO Monthly Mini Build event yesterday. Hopefully, LEGO is learning and listening to their customer base. We hope future changes to the website are made with us in mind.