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Dear Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen and LEGO:
I have just visited your new web-site and find that I am appalled. For
a toy that has shown such strong ties with the scholastic community and such
sensitivity for the children that use your product; this page is a disaster.
The main problems with your web-site are that it is not disabled
accessible, requires the latest technology, and is very large per web-page.
These three problems combine to make an unusable travesty of a web-site, that
discriminates against a majority of their chosen audience. When combined with
the fact that it is very hard to navigate, the web-site becomes useless.
The first and most inexcusable problem is that if a disabled person,
either hard of seeing or blind (or even in some other cases) visits your site,
they will only "see" the following:
[btn065x020us0home.gif] [btn064x020us0shop.gif]
[btn059x020us0help.gif] [und001x020us0topnavigation.gif]
[und001x020us0topnavigation.gif] [und055x020us0topnavigstuds.gif]
[und001x001us0dot.gif]
This does not look like the web-site of a company that has valued it's
customer base since it first decided that "Play Well" was the motto it would
live by. I would challenge you to successfully navigate this site in this
form.
I would like to point out that in the US, it is illegal to discriminate
against the handicapped. While there have been no court cases (yet) over
web-site accessibility, I'm sure it is a matter of time.
The next problem is that even if your customer isn't handicapped, the
customer (either a young child or a an adult who may or may not understand
computer technology), you are asking them to use nothing but the latest
technology.
Many people use older platforms, MacOS 6.x or 7.x or Windows 3.x.
There has not been a new browser for these platforms for several years. Even
worse, if the customer is accessing this site from a school, you can almost
guarantee that the machine is old (ie, more than 2 years old).
Lets say that one of these people *does* try to get their 2-4 year old
hardware (which works fine for all other purposes) to run the latest software.
Windows 98 says it requires a 486 with 24 MB of RAM and 260 MB of hard-disk
space.
From personal experience, this will be barely usable to run programs
like notepad.exe. Web browser will be *very* slow, and adding shockwave and
flash to this browser will make it unusable.
Of course, this assumes that such a computer exists. Many schools
and libraries can't meet this level of technology. Not even counting people
who cannot afford new equipment.
This says nothing about people who own platforms like WebTV, which do
*not* have Java.
Finally the size of the pages of your web-site are huge the "noflash"
version of your web-page weighs in at 230kb. On a 14.4 modem, this will take
about 190+ seconds or about 3 and half minutes. On a 28.8 modem, the most
common speed it will take about a minute and a half.
The size of the flash version of your site is considerably bigger, but
it is not easy to calculate since I don't have access to all the files.
Is this really acceptable for a company that prides itself on its
ability to "play well" with children? To exclude handicapped children, to
require expensive and sometimes confusing software and to expect a child to sit
through a minute or more of downloading time?
Perhaps I don't understand the direction that LEGO is going. Perhaps
LEGO's new target market is perfect, rich children who have only the latest
toys. If it is, then I am not sure I can believe that playing with LEGO is
playing well.
Sincerely,
Christian Höltje
docwhat@gerf.org
Copies of this letter were sent to:
kjeld.kristiansen@EUROPE.LEGO.COM
erik.krogh@EUROPE.LEGO.COM
john.raj@EUROPE.LEGO.COM
webmaster@LEGO.com
Administrator@LEGO.com
root@LEGO.com
lugnet.dear-lego@lugnet.com
Examples of what users of the LEGO toys think:
http://www.lugnet.com/general/?n=8649
http://www.lugnet.com/general/?n=8659
To see what a website might looks like without all the graphics (like someone
who cannot afford a brand-new computer or is handicapped), get the lynx
web browser:
http://lynx.browser.org/
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: Criticisms of the new LEGO web-site
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| Another thing to point out: Even if people have platforms that support Java, many people disable it to avoid possibilities of destructive web sites (or like me at work, just getting tired of the whole browser getting blown away by Javascript bugs). (25 years ago, 18-Oct-99, to lugnet.dear-lego, lugnet.general)
| | | Re: Criticisms of the new LEGO web-site
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| <snip of a well writen criticism of www.lego.com> While navigating the site I found a poll that gives you three options as to what you think of the new site (of course none of them are negative!!!). The poll is at... (URL) here are the current (...) (25 years ago, 18-Oct-99, to lugnet.dear-lego, lugnet.general)
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