Lego Life

Lego Life is a social media app developed by The Lego Group. It was designed for children between the ages of 8 and 12 years to create, share and interact with others in a safe digital environment. The app was released as a free download from Google Play and Apple Store on 31 January 2017. Lego Life was designed to be a social network for children, with the aim to keep children interested in the Lego brand for longer. It features a variety of functions that focus on encouraging children to be inspired, create, share and comment on Lego builds and products within a moderated community. To ensure that the app is safe for children to use, Lego Life incorporates a variety of child safety features to protect personal information and is heavily moderated by trained Lego employees.

User experience

Lego Life aims to complement and enhance children’s physical interaction and play with Lego within a digital environment. It was designed to increase the socialisation of Lego play, by allowing children to take pride in their own creations and to share them with a like-minded community on a larger scale. The app is free to download and use and does not feature any in app purchases.

Registration

Unlike many other social media apps, Lego Life was designed to ensure that a child must gain parental permission and register an account by using a parent’s email address to sign up. The parental user profile is then locked behind a numeric gateway so that it can only be changed by an adult. The app was also designed to ensure that personal data is not collected and that tracking is not enabled.

Lego Life ensures that users cannot share personal information with the community. Users are prohibited from using personal information, including real names and must instead select a randomly generated username when registering, which is built from three random words.

Personalisation

The app incorporates features that make the experience personal by allowing children to customise the content according to their own interests. This includes creating a personal Lego minifigure or minidoll avatar, which can be built using digital parts and then be shared with the community. The avatar can be customised in terms of gender, hair, outfit and handheld objects. Users can become a member of various groups associated with individual topics and interests, which are typically based on Lego themes and campaigns, such as Lego City, Friends, Ninjago, Jurassic World, sports, buildings and vehicles.

Communication and moderation

All interaction on Lego life is moderated to ensure that the environment is completely safe for children to use. Positivity is actively encouraged in Lego Life in relation to communication. Users can upload images and videos, share Lego builds and comment on other builds, images, videos and quizzes using a Lego emoji keyboard. Users can also “like” other users’ content by clicking a heart icon. These interactions are then rewarded with digital badges. Each interaction is reviewed and must be approved by a moderator before it is published within the community. All images and videos are screened by algorithms and moderators to ensure that they only feature Lego content and that the user cannot be identified in the image. Users are not given the ability to send private messages to friends, but they are able to send friend requests and follow their friends to view recent uploads.

The main form of communication within the app is the Lego emoji keyboard, which replaces standard text-based communication. It was designed as a safety feature to reduce cyberbullying and was developed following global research into children’s use of emojis in communication. The research concluded that 90% of children were familiar with emojis and used them in communication. The Lego emoji keyboard was developed with a Lego appearance and features a variety of fun stickers as a way to provide children with a universal language that can be understood around the globe.

Newsfeed

Once users have customised their experience by choosing their interests from a selection of user groups, they receive a newsfeed which allows them to see updates from the chosen groups as a group member. The newsfeed acts as a central hub for consuming Lego content, which includes products, adverts, videos and pictures from Lego themes related to the chosen user groups. The updates in the newsfeed also include the most recently uploaded images, videos, challenges and competitions, which all focus on Lego content, ensuring that the user is not exposed to other forms of advertising. The app also features posts from Lego master builders, including fictional characters, such as Master Wu from Ninjago and Emma from the Friends theme.

Lego inventory

Users have the option of building an inventory of their Lego collection within the app by searching and finding the sets by set number, description or using a QR scanner to scan the code on the instruction book or box of a Lego set.

Development

According to Lego, the idea for Lego Life originated in monitoring how children shared their Lego builds in LEGO Club Magazine’s “Cool Creations” section and posted their creations on the company’s message boards. Lego Life was developed to transfer this desire to share creations into an online environment.

During the development of Lego Life, The Lego Group collaborated with UNICEF to ensure that appropriate child safety measures were put in place within the app. Lego also partnered with a content moderation company named Crisp, which screens every image uploaded to ensure that images are safe before being shared.

Release

The app was initially launched in the UK, US, Canada, France, Germany, Denmark, Austria and Switzerland on 31 January 2017.

Reception

Lego Life has received mostly positive responses since its release, with reviewers praising the extensive child safety features and the fun and creative activities.

SAFE.BecauseFamily.org commented positively about the fun ideas and challenges presented to children, which included internet safety lessons, but criticised the merchandising and advertising aspect of the app.

Christy Matte for Common Sense Media also responded positively to the child safety functions within the app but also noted that, “there's no escape from the commercial nature of this experience”.

Brickshow commented that, “LEGO’s core values and priorities are integrated into the app’s overall environment: TLG has setup the LEGO Life app in such a way that the online safety of its users is its utmost concern without missing out on the fun.”

External links

Lego Life on Lego.com