Bamboozled Escape Games Resource Package (2023)
Contribution
User Research, Content Strategy, Storyboarding, Copywriting
Type
Information Design
Client
Bamboozled Escape Games
Team
Jasper Precilla, Sam Newaz, Sahar Babaei
OVERVIEW
Bamboozled Escape Games is a family-oriented escape room that offers an immersive story-telling experience. My team designed the Innovation Island package, equipping the business with engaging resources for bi-weekly brainstorming activities to enhance their business operations. As a result, they improved their workplace culture and saw an increase in staff performance.
This project was completed for a senior-level research methods course. As a UX Researcher, I conducted ethnography research, user interviews, led a participatory workshop, and created user personas and journey maps to identify the needs and pain points of the staff and management team. I also aided in building the storyboard for our final package to effectively communicate the actions and goals of the product.
OBJECTIVES
This design project focuses on creating a fun and interactive experience where staff can creatively assess team priorities throughout their fast-paced weeks. Innovation Island aims to:
Gather Ideas
Invite staff to share their ideas to managers to facilitate two-way communication
Establish Protocol
Provide a structured way of communicating new changes to all members of the team
Keeping a tab
Monitor and track who has and hasn’t read new business updates
THE PROBLEM
Employees emphasized the need of established protocols to improve efficiency and consistency of staff performance, but the root issue isn’t the lack of standardization—it’s the poor delivery of information. Thus, we framed our problem space to:
HOW MIGHT WE
foster effective team communication and collaboration by inviting Game Masters to share their ideas and concerns more to improve as a team?
THE SOLUTION
Our final design for Bamboozled Escape games, Innovation Island package, is a collaborative board dedicated to problem solving that makes Game Masters aware of current issues and invites them to think creatively and offer ideas. This includes an instructional booklet, opportunity slips, a rules sheet, and a Notion Guide for management to use. Within this process, the sections are divided into 3 phases:
THE PROCESS
Getting to Know Our Client
Our team conducted an initial field study, shadowing individual game masters (staff)to better understand their workflow and day to day tasks. Six 15 minute in-person interviews with staff and 4 remote interviews with past customers were conducted. We asked them questions to help us pinpoint the highlights and frustrations staff and visitors may face throughout their work and player experience
.
Key Findings
- issues of divided attention
- lack of standardization
- lack of accessibility
Initial Design Focus
Reduce the cognitive load on employees by transferring mental tasks to physical ones or digital systems.
Diving Deeper With User Personas
When mapping out our user personas, we struggled to solidify strong archetypes that felt personal and true to what we observed. This made us realize we needed to do more research, thus I went back to the field to get more specific data about the ins and outs of being a game master. I personally conducted 8 semi-structured 20- 40 minute in-person interviews with the managers and staff at their establishment.
Key Takeaways:
- How can I support the game masters at their busiest hours when multiple groups need assistance?
- How can I help game masters feel assured that they are providing the customers the best possible experience?
- How can I help game masters recover from hiccups that can affect the player experience?
Journey Mapping
This journey map outlines the process game masters have to go through during a fully booked weekend shift. While developing this map, our team decided to create one large journey for 2 personas instead of 1. This was done to reflect how game masters rely and work adjacent to each other during the busiest hours.
Participatory Workshop
Re-defining Art & Design
The loading screen sets the tone for the website by engaging visitors to define what art and design is in relation to the screened films. A load-in animation of images helps spark curiosity in drawing users into the content.
Art vs. Design
Interviews with the creators featured in the films encourage viewers to shift perspectives between art and design. The background context provided about each film helps visitors gain deeper insights, helping them make more informed interpretations.
Seeing Past the Film
Additional creative works from the artists featured in the films allows visitors to deep dive into their influences and sub-culture in order to further reflect on the spectrum of art to design.
Reflecting on the Film
The recap card encourages active participation from visitors to share their thoughts on a specific film and where they place it on a scale from art to design.
Proceeding into the 3 hour workshop, we had two co-owners and an employee who all share the role of "Game Master", along with our 4 team members participating.
Moving into the Final Solution
My team proposed a collaborative board dedicated to problem solving that makes game masters aware of current issues and invites them to think creatively and offer ideas. Through the resource package provided, the Innovation Island project concept aims to positively impact the staff by providing effective protocols that would solve underlying problems of poor delivery of information.
Phase 1: Gathering Ideas and the Rules
Innovation Island can get messy, so there are guidelines in place to ensure that people to be respectful of each other's ideas and keep it structured enough for easy analysis.
Opportunity Chest & Slips
These slips were provided to aid the staff with a quick and easy template to print out and use immediately. These slips give an "opportunity" for game masters to list an issue or idea that has come up with room to further explain and rate the priority level.
Phase 2: Analyse the Board
Phase 3: Announce the info in Notion
Notion demo video
REFLECTION
Finding Solutions that Hold Long Term Value
When working with a local family business, a lot of the issues that we pin pointed involved practical applications surround their operations which needed to be re-adjusted. As I became more invested with the company and learned about our stakeholders, my team and I truly wanted to create a process that could stick around, not temporarily, but have a critical impact for their future endeavours. While the final solution wasn’t super innovative, I truly believe that it was the right fit for their business that ensures all staff members are involved and proactive.
Trusting the Process
When my team felt like we were hitting a wall and not getting anywhere, it was easy to become demotivated on how to move forward. However, what really helped was looking back at our research to understand and re-analyze the steps within our process. By taking a step back, it allowed us to fill in the gaps to pieces where we might have looked over or forgotten key details. Trusting this process and our own research made it possible to solidify our ideas and be confident in how we would eventually execute our final concept.
