For many years, the people designing, managing, and delivering user experiences have pursued the LEGO ideal – making experiences modular.
Content teams have aimed to make content modular so that it can be assembled in multiple ways. UI design teams have worked to make user interfaces modular so they can be assembled in different ways as well.
More recently, vendors have embraced the LEGO ideal. The IT research firm Gartner labeled this modular approach as “composable” and now scores of SaaS firms endorse composability as the most desirable approach for building user experiences.
The LEGO ideal has become a defining North Star for many digital teams.
The appeal of LEGO is easy to fathom. LEGO is familiar to almost everyone.
Though LEGO was not the first construction kit toy that allowed parts to be connected in multiple ways, it has by far been the most successful. LEGO is now the world’s largest toymaker.
But LEGO’s appeal stems from more than its popularity or the nostalgia of adults for pleasant childhood memories. LEGO teaches lessons about managing systems – though those lessons are often not well understood.
What LEGO figured out: Clutch Power
What’s been the secret to LEGO’s success? Why has LEGO, more than any other construction toy, achieved sustained global success for decades?
Many people attribute LEGO’s success to the properties of the bricks themselves. The magic comes from how the bricks fit together,
The Washington Post noted in 1983 the importance of “the grip that holds one piece to another. Measurements have to be exact down to minute fractions of an inch, which requires high-precision machinery and closely monitored quality control.”
The ability of the bricks to fit together so well has a name: clutch power.
The fan blog Brick Architect defines clutch power as “Newtons of force to attach or remove the part.”
The Washington Post noted that the bricks’ clutch power translated into “market clutch power”: how solidly the bricks built a grip with consumers.
Clutch power makes bricks more powerful:
- Bricks can connect easily – they snap together
- Bricks can be disassembled easily by pulling them apart
- Bricks are not damaged or deformed through their repeated use
- Bricks are infinitely reusable.
Clutch power is an apt metaphor for how brinks connect. Like the clutch in a car that shifts between gears, clutch power allows bricks of different sizes and roles to work together to deliver a bigger experience.
What makes content and design LEGO-like?
Truth be told, most content and design modules don’t snap together like LEGOs. Content and design modules rarely exhibit clutch power.
Even if the original intent was to create a LEGO-like kit of parts, the actual implementation doesn’t deliver a LEGO-like experience. It’s important to move past the pleasing metaphor of LEGOs and explore what makes LEGOs distinctive.
LEGO bricks aren’t for very small children – they are a choking hazard. Similarly, some teams figuratively “choke” when trying to manage many small content and design elements. They are overwhelmed because they aren’t mature enough to manage the details.
Attempts to create modularity in content and design often fall short of the LEGO ideal. They resemble LEGO’s junior sibling, DUPLO, offering simple connections of a limited range of shapes. In addition to generic bricks, DUPLO includes less general pieces such as specialized shapes and figures. It reduces the choking hazard but limits what can be built.
We find examples of DUPLO-like modularity in many UX processes. A small interaction pattern is reused, but it only addresses a very specific user journey such as a form flow. Small UI “molecules” are defined in design systems, but not more complex organisms. Help content gets structured, but not marketing or app content.
The limitation of DUPLO approach is the modularity isn’t flexible. Teams can’t create multiple experiences from the pieces.
When teams can’t create complex experiences out of small pieces, they resort to gluing the pieces together. Pieces of content and design get glued together – their connections are forced, preventing them from being reused easily. The outputs become one-off, single-use designs that can’t be used for multiple purposes.
Some people glue together LEGO bricks, even though doing so is not considered an approved best practice. They create an edifice that is too fragile and too precious to change. Their design is too brittle to take advantage of the intrinsic clutch power of the bricks. They create a single-use design. They use modularity to build a monolith.
Digital teams routinely build monolithic structures from smaller pieces. They create content templates or frontend design frameworks that look and behave a certain way but are difficult to change. They build an IKEA product that can’t be disassembled when you need to move.
So what gives content and design clutch power? What allows pieces to connect and be reconfigured?
The digital equivalent of clutch power is systems interface design – how the interfaces between various systems know of and can interact with each other. It determines whether the modules are created in a way that they are “API-first” so that other systems can use the pieces without having to interpret what’s available.
More concretely, giving content and design modules clutch power involves defining them with models. Models show how pieces can fit together.,
Models define things (resources) and their relationships, highlighting that things have a rich set of potential connections. They can snap together in many ways, not just in one way.
Defining things and their relationships is not easy, which is why the LEGO ideal remains elusive for many digital teams. It requires a combination of analytic and linguistic proficiency. Relationships are of two kinds:
- Conceptual relationships that express the properties that things share with each other, which requires the ability to name and classify these properties clearly, at the right granularity (abstraction), to enable connection and comparison with appropriate precision.
- Logical relationships that express the constraints and requirements of things and their values, which calls for the ability define what is normal, expected, exceptional, and prohibited from the perspective of multiple actors engaged in an open range of scenarios.
Modeling skills transcend the priorities of UI and content “design”, which focus on creating a product intended to support a single purpose. Modeling skills are more akin to engineering, without being cryptic. Modular pieces must be easy to connect, cognitively and procedurally.
We sometimes find organizations hire content engineers, content architects, information architects, or UI engineers, but most often designers and developers are in charge of implementation. We need more folks focused on creating clutch power.
What LEGO is still learning – and their lessons for digital teams
LEGO created a system that could grow. It expanded by offering new brick shapes that allow a wider range of items to be built.
LEGO has proved remarkably enduring. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to adapt. To maintain market clutch power, LEGO needs to adapt to a changing market. Its past formulas for success can no longer be relied upon.
LEGO’s bricks are made from ABS plastic. ABS plastic gives the bricks their clutch power. But they are also environmentally bad as they are petroleum-based and have a big carbon footprint. As the world’s biggest toymaker, producing billions of plastic bricks, LEGO needs to change its model.
LEGO has tried to change the formula for their bricks. They’ve sought to replace ABS with recycled polyethylene terephthalate (RPET) but found it too soft to provide the needed clutch power. Additives to RPET, which would make it safer and more durable, require too much energy consumption. After intensive research, LEGO is discovering there’s no simple substitute for ABS.
LEGO’s dilemma highlights the importance of creating a system that can adapt to changing priorities. It’s not that clutch power became less important. But it had to fit in with new priorities of reducing carbon emissions.
One option LEGO is looking at is how to enable the “recircling” of bricks. How can bricks in one household, when no longer needed, be re-entered into the economy? LEGO is looking at a “circular business model” for bricks.
A circular model is one that digital teams should look at as well. The aim should not just be how a team can reuse their content and design modules, but also how other parts of their organization can reuse them, and perhaps, how outside parties can use them too. An API-first approach makes recirculation much easier. Better collaboration from vendors would also help.
– Michael Andrews