ABOUT THE PROJECT: I love board games and wanted to incorporate a board game theme into this eLearning module.
View module: Who Killed Office Morale? Find the Clues to Solve the Murder Mystery
THE PROBLEM / SOLUTION: The best employees often get promoted to management. But the behaviors that get them promoted to management are not the ones they need to succeed in their new role. In order to perform effectively, a newly appointed manager needs to learn a new set of soft skills. They needed a low-stakes way to explore and practice interpersonal, leadership skills and management concepts using a game that was fun to play. We built an eLearning experience similar to the murder mystery board game, Clue (e.g. Miss Scarlet in the Conservatory with a Wrench). To win, learners investigate 12 Elements of Great Managing from 10 million employee and manager interviews conducted by Gallop, and discover how effective managers create a healthy work environment where people are highly productive and enjoy their work.
THE DESIGN: We wanted to create something light-hearted, upbeat and fun. So, I went for color! Bright colors, movement, attractive graphics that were attractive to look at. The Clue characters were designed by Arturo Aguirre, who is a freelance graphic artist from Guatemala. He redesigned the cast of characters from Clue, the board game. The characters’ clothing and hairstyles are from a french colonial era. He is an amazing graphic artist. I liked the playfulness of the design and incorporated his characters into the scenario.
FEATURES: Game play needed to imitate the mechanics of the board game Clue, which is essentially a tracking and elimination game. I created an interactive score card which the players could use to keep track of the clues as they discovered them. Training modules typically require the learner to go step-by-step through a training pathway. We wanted to free up the learner to have more choices in the direction and pacing of the learning. For example, learners decide which order to visit the rooms on the map. They can jump immediately to making an accusation whenever they want. But just as in the real game, doing so could mean that they guess too soon, before they have gathered enough clues to solve the mystery. I treat this lightly on purpose. Since the goal is not to remember what Miss Scarlet said about the complaint box, rather, it is for the learner to become familiar with what employees need to thrive in the workplace.
THE DESIGN PROCESS: I used Adobe Photoshop to create the silhouette-style graphics, and Adobe Illustrator to modify this colorful vector graphic in the comic style from freepic. Background vector created by Freepik. The background graphic brought it all together for me. I really like the look and feel of the pages.
RESEARCH The target audience for this learning module is new managers. The content is derived from 12: The Elements of Great Management written by Rodd Wagner and James K. Harter. We wrote a synopsis of the 12 Elements to create the copy for the content pages.
TOOLS USED: Articulate 360, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator.
