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Dear LEGO Direct:
It seems like the official LEGO website becomes more confusing and harder to
use every day. Earlier today I visited:
http://www.lego.com/info/fairplay.asp
http://www.lego.com/info/privacypolicy.asp
http://www.lego.com/info/legal.asp
http://www.lego.com/info/toyofthecentury.asp
http://www.lego.com/info/lifelongcreativity.asp
http://www.lego.com/info/dreamforthefuture.asp
http://www.lego.com/info/press.asp?year=2000
http://www.lego.com/info/press.asp?year=1999
and was disappointed that I can no longer read more than just the first few
sentences on each page; the rest of the text on the page is physically beyond
my grasp. I see tiny little scrolly arrows in the lower righthand corner of
the text, but their behavior is neither intuitive nor correct.
I moved my mouse across the down-arrow image, and the text I was reading
suddenly shot to the bottom. I hadn't clicked any mouse button, much less
asked it to scroll all the way down to the bottom in what seemed like the
blink of an eye. I moved my mouse across the up-arrow image and the text
shot back up to the top. I could see a blur of text scrolling by, but it
scrolled too quickly for me to read it or to stop it where I wanted it, or
even to scroll just a few lines at a time.
To add insult to injury, I can't print the page and read it offline! All
that shows up is the first few words because of all that JavaScript muckety-
muck. You're asking an adult to read an awful lot of text in a very tiny
font on the screen, and it's very important text. I need to print it.
I realize that I am running an OS (GNU/Linux) that isn't probably used by
many of your customers, so I can imagine that the JavaScript scrolling code
wasn't perhaps tested on all platforms as it should have been. Nevertheless,
turning to Netscape Communicator 4.5 on my Microsoft Windows 95 system, the
situation is no better: there, the text scrolled slowly enough to read, but
there was a line-break after every-single word, making the text unreadable
in a different way. And when I tried to print the page, all I got was the
first few words of the text.
I went into my Preferences and disabled JavaScript in my browser, and then I
could read all the text, because the page checks whether or not JavaScript is
enabled. However, it's apparent that the page wasn't usability-tested with
JavaScript disabled, because what results looks almost as disastrous as the
JavaScript-enabled page. At least it's readable, but how many people have
the patience to go through all that work or even know how to do it?
I can't figure out why these pages were redesigned. What once were simple,
elegant, well designed, friendly, useful and informative web pages are now
overly complex, inelegant, poorly designed, unfriendly, useless and
informationless pages of muckety-muck -- even when they work as designed.
And for what? So that some poor user can mouse over itty bitty nonstandard
yellow arrows instead of using normal standard scrollbars or keyboard arrows
to scroll the text? What genious thought this up?!
I say tar and feather whoever is responsible for this abomination. At the
very least, help them find a position in another role; they shouldn't be
developing web pages. If you let them stay, they'll take the LEGO website
down the toilet and eventually the Company with it.
The very first LEGO website -- the one that went up way back in March of
1996 -- was by far the most usable. It wasn't particularly zingy or
information-rich, but it *was* simple and friendly and by golly and it
actually worked.
As a long-time LEGO customer, I can't help feeling that the people running
the show at www.lego.com today care less and less about good old-fashioned
web values and ever more about bells and whistles. This is so very
disappointing to realize again and again every time the site is updated.
Please, show me that I am wrong!
Respectful but disenchanted,
--Todd Lehman
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