Viral Emergency!
Escape Room
A story-driven escape room that fulfills basic compliance training on personal protective equipment for healthcare workers.
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Audience: Healthcare Workers
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Responsibilities: Instructional Design, eLearning Design, and Analysis
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Tools: Articulate Storyline, Microsoft PowerPoint, Adobe Photoshop, ClickUp, LucidChart, and Audacity
Overview
Compliance training is completed on a yearly basis in healthcare and has a bad reputation for being repetitive and boring. I converted a normal compliance training on PPE into a story-driven and interactive escape room experience.
After interviewing several individuals working in the healthcare field about the quality and usefulness of their yearly compliance training, I received feedback that the pieces of training were often boring and disliked by most of the staff. The interviews also revealed that many employees let the training run and do not interact with it. This is a major cause for concern because the training is not actually being utilized, it is just being completed and ignored.​
Process
My main focus for this project was on common videogame and escape room features. I researched ideas such as using a heads-up display (HUD) and different puzzles common to escape rooms.
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I began with a needs analysis with two different SMEs to ensure that the training met the needs of yearly compliance training about PPE and followed industry standards.
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From there an outline of the story was created followed by a narrative storyboard about how the story would progress throughout the escape room. This was changed several times to be more realistic and fit the idea of using the required PPE. A flowchart was created using Lucidchart to ensure the proper flow of the game and the story. This was then reviewed to ensure needs were being met.
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Microsoft PowerPoint was used to create an initial storyboard that consisted of placeholders for the aesthetics and focused on the general layout of the rooms and the intended interactions. After feedback was collected, a final storyboard and visual mockups were designed.
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A functional prototype was created using Articulate Storyline 360 after feedback iterations were made and beta testing commenced with several groups of testers with different areas of expertise. Iterations were made and the final product was developed and released.
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Visual Mockups
Lucidchart was used to create a flowchart and Microsoft PowerPoint was used to create both the initial and final storyboards. Adobe Photoshop was used to make mockup designs and illustrations.
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Development
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The three phases (alpha, beta, & final) of development were all conducted using Articulate Storyline 360. The design consisted of a title page that included a choice to either take the classic lesson or the escape room, giving the learner a choice in how they completed the course. The story was presented in several slides using a comic book style design. This was followed by the actual escape room activity and a final quiz.
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The slide to create was the HUD which was created as a master slide so it would appear on all of the game slides. The HUD included a countdown timer, tracking of lives, hints, notes, and badges which were in the form of the items found throughout the escape room.
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A countdown timer was needed to add a sense of urgency to the escape room. Articulate Storyline does not have this as a native feature so one needed to be created. To do this I used a shape with three different animations, two were set at one second and the third at half of a second. A variable was created to track time on a four-digit timer. This variable would reduce the second number by one when the animation on the shape is completed. The others would change based upon the previous variables, this created a working clock that would countdown from ten minutes.
Final Testing
Final testing was conducted by a number of healthcare workers and instructional designers using multiple devices such as cell phones and tablets, also multiple internet browsers were tested for bugs. During this process, it was discovered that if the learner left a slide with the menu open, then the menu became unresponsive for the rest of the course. The only way to fix this was by returning to the previous slide and closing the menu. To fix this I created a trigger that closed the menu when the timeline started on each slide. This reset the status of the menu to its default of being closed as the beginning of each slide and eliminate the responsiveness problem.