LEGO MINDSTORMS empowers users to build, code, and bring their own robots to life. Previous sets had a steep learning curve, making robotics feel complex and intimidating—especially for beginners. Our goal was to release a modern MINDSTORMS experience from the ground up, making it more intuitive, engaging, and accessible while ensuring flexibility for advanced users.
My Role
Product Designer
Interaction Design, Visual Design, UX Flows, Prototyping, Usability Testing
Timeline
June 2019 - July 2021
Team
Engineers, Model Designers, Product Managers, Marketers, UI Designers
Tools
Figma, Sketch, Playtesting, Prototyping
Getting Started
New users often felt overwhelmed by coding and hardware setup. I designed guided tutorials, interactive visual cues, and step-by-step instructions to make onboarding intuitive and help users feel confident from the start.
New users are greeted with a tutorial designed to quickly familiarize them with the hardware and coding basics, making it easy to get started.
The tutorial guides users step-by-step, from simple tasks like turning on the Hub to more advanced tasks like coding with machine learning.
The cards flexibly adjust based on instructions, shifting from full-screen guides to small tooltips in the coding canvas, progressing to the next step as users complete tasks.
The learn section offers a central hub where users can easily discover tutorials, how-to videos, and guides. This unified space helps users explore, build, and master new skills.
Robot Lobby
With 27 and counting robots, I designed a space that showcases each robot’s unique personality while making it easy to find the right one. The layout is flexible, adapting to different robot types and ensuring a seamless browsing experience.
The lobby features a vertically scrollable layout with distinct sections that help users easily differentiate between robot types.
Selecting a robot opens its dedicated page that highlights its unique personality with engaging video trailers and showcase the interactive, hands-on activities.
Users follow an in-app guide to build and code their robot, bringing it to life step-by-step. Each robot supports 9+ activities including props and gadgets to play with.
Coding Canvas
The coding canvas is a flexible, intuitive space where users can bring ideas to life. With powerful features and a drag-and-drop interface, it makes coding playful yet powerful, simplifying complex concepts while supporting advanced logic as users grow.
We adopted MIT's Scratch coding language, customizing it to match the MINDSTORMS visual style and optimizing it for touch-based and smaller screens.
Easily manage all your open projects, or create new ones.
The projects drawers lets users access the coding canvas from the lobby, staying subtle yet always available. Dragging it up reveals a dedicated page for all their code projects.
There's over 200 programming blocks, empowering users to easily control the Hub, motors, and sensors for limitless creativity. We even have weather blocks!
With the Machine Learning extension, users learn computational thinking through image and audio recognition. This allows their creations to respons to user actions like a smile or a voice command, unlocking novel, interactive play possibilities.
For experienced users, Python is available as text-based coding, offering greater flexibility for more sophisticated projects and advanced programming possibilities.
The Help Center is just a click away, offering a comprehensive library of guides and videos to support users on their coding journey. For quick tips, simply right-click (or long press) any block to see an explanation of its function.
Delightful Animations
Remote Control
The virtual remote control features customizable widgets like joysticks, sliders, and buttons, all of which can be coded for specific actions. It's seamlessly supported cross devices for a seamless experience.
And Much More!
This page highlights just a glimpse of the experiences and features I designed for one of LEGO's most ambitious and intricate interactive projects.
A Million Downloads
and Stellar Reviews
4.7/5 stars on Amazon.com
“The Best Mindstorms Yet”
“this set is incredibly fun to play with!!”
“Well-designed. Control software is user-friendly.”
"Exceeded my expectation"
“If your child is interested in building robotic models and learning programming, this set is one of the best options on the market right now.”
“This is not another LEGO set. This is the best LEGO set EVER. It enables your child to design robotic machines that work, even if you child is as young as nine. It's not about building the designs included. It's the total freedom to materialise any mechanical logically controlled idea. LEGO deserve the ultimate praise and accolades for designing this ultimate accessible product. Thank you LEGO!”
Customer review on LEGO.com
Deliverables
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