Explained: How you can help build ‘the ultimate LEGO app’ on Discord

Brick Search Plus is building a LEGO fan community on Discord with the sole purpose of putting you in charge of designing what comes next on its app.

Currently Brick Search Plus contains a full LEGO set database of over 10,000 sets, with collection management and wishlist functionality. The app also includes a newly-revamped minifigure scanner that can identify the contents of any Collectible Minifigure blind box instantly, in-camera and even offline without phone signal or internet connection. There’s also a LEGO set scanner in the app, and even price comparison data to find a good deal on any currently-available product.

But as an app, Brick Search Plus can be even more than all that – it can be anything it intends to be. Any feature, function, utility or service can be built into the app, and any idea or concept can be made into something cool and genuinely useful to LEGO fans. But rather than have Brick Search Plus build anything into the app that it wants, Brick Search Plus wants to build everything into the app that you want, as LEGO fans with all sorts of needs, wants and desires for a unique and beneficial LEGO service available on your phone.

How to help build a LEGO app

And to do that Brick Search Plus has started a LEGO community on Discord that you can join and get involved with in any way that you wish.

You can follow along with progress and behind-the-scenes insight into the current updates that the Brick Search Plus team is working on for the app. You can actively take part in polls or discussions on specific changes or certain features you’d like to see brought in, be those on existing pages and tools or on upcoming updates.

You can have a say on user experience on the app and offer insight into the broader journey in and around the app. You can suggest small tweaks to a redesign – move a button here, recolour a section there. Or you can go as big as your imagination takes you and pitch ideas or suggestions for completely new concepts that could entirely change the game for you and every other LEGO fan using the app (of which there are over 1 million…).

As a starting point, the Brick Search Plus team will be using Discord to showcase current upgrades being worked on, including revamped home page, database, set listing, collection and wishlist pages. And the team is throwing open to its Discord community exactly how each of those pages could look and work.

For example…

For a taste of what this may look like, the development work on the database page has so far explored three different directions for design and functionality. The first of these is simply re-purposing the current home page of the app – which is fundamentally just a scrollable list of every currently active LEGO theme – into a home for the database. This layout is most familiar with the existing userbase and provides an easy-to-navigate list of themes you can select and start browsing, with results sorted by latest additions first.

Or maybe the database home page would benefit from a more engaging, inviting presentation that allows initial browsing of the latest additions to each theme and offers a bit more interactivity or information. It saves a click for those wanting to get a snapshot of what’s newest for each theme.

In addition, the app could include the option to order themes by personal preference, as well as the ability to follow particular themes so that you are notified of new additions via in-app notifications. Theme pages could then include the option to switch between a grid and list view of sets.

Or perhaps LEGO fans using the app for its database and at either end of the use-case spectrum – from serious collection management to casual browsing – would appreciate a database with a few additional extras. For serious collectors and active LEGO fans and builders, adding in parts and minifigures to the database would instantly change the presentation of the database home page.

Likewise, for those less familiar with each theme or more curious to browse cross-theme or recognisable subjects rather than unfamiliar brands, introducing category lists would be useful to work into the database. These two changes alone could dramatically change how the database home page looks.

The beauty of the app is that any of these – or other – designs and functions can be considered for creating a database home page on Brick Search Plus, and if you are so inclined to know what you would like to see and want to share it in a way that would be genuinely heard and considered, or you are just curious to see which creative direction things head in, then subscribing to Brick Search Plus and joining the app’s Discord is where you can do just that. On the app’s Discord the Brick Search Plus team will discuss these designs and more with LEGO fans interested in having a say on which way works best.

Brick Search Plus is going to be changing and growing over the coming months as the app brings in new features, redesigns and tools to help take LEGO collecting to a new level, and for LEGO fans of all interests. Which upgrades the app introduces first and how they look, work and function will be directly influenced by the LEGO fans working with the team on the Brick Search Plus Discord.

Subscribe to Brick Search Plus from as little as £1.99 / $2.99 to unlock unlimited access to all the app’s current features and have a direct say in all its future ones too.

Once you’ve subscribed, sign up to the Brick Search newsletter through the My Account page in the app. You’ll then receive an email with an active invite link to the Discord server. (The direct link to the server in the My Account page will be updated and functional soon.)

FAQs

The below FAQs will also provide more information on how Discord works, how to sign up to it and how to accept the invitation as a Brick Search Plus subscriber to join the app’s Discord.