Escapeshow
Website Case Study
UX design for a new website & back-office
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Project Overview
How EscapeShow migrated their real-life game to an online service
EscapeShow provides live, tailor-made escape room experiences for private and business groups. Their main goal is to provide a unique group activity and create meaningful experiences for friends, family, or colleagues. To accomplish this, EscapeShow developed an original game operated by actors, that integrates personal information about the participants within the plot, making the experience especially personal and meaningful. During the covid-19 pandemic, when the whole world started its pivot to alternative online activities, EscapeShow aimed to expand its services, create an online version of the game utilizing video conference platforms, and expand the market reach to new audiences globally.
The Challenge
Creating meaningful social experiences in the midst of the global pandemic
Understanding the impact and practical challenges for translating their business to an online experience, with the option for the users to book online, and manage the game details and for the admin users to manage these games and fulfill the games with minimal intervention by customer services, we realized the three most challenging aspects were these below:
Physical goes online
Translating the physical game to an online experience meant rethinking the existing landing page and looking accommodating for game booking and management, online.
Tricky pricing model
As it usually is with pricing for groups, the model is modular end flexible. There is a minimum price, and a price per head that goes down for every participant added. The challenge was to communicating it for online booking.
Tailor-made show
Each game is carefully planned and tailor-made to the group, integrated with the names and personal stories of the participants. This provides a great challenge when seeking to manage games at a large scale offline.
Research
Finding out about the needs of our users
In the first step to forming the solution, I had multiple sessions with the stakeholders at EscapeShow getting familiar with the game mechanisms and the ins and outs of the operation, exploring the existing state and the pain points, the user's and business needs, the goals, needs and challenges of each persona.
We reviewed the existing process of booking an event and identified the pain points for each persona.
User Personas
The client - Private
The client - Business
The actor - Operator
The Administrator
Task analysis
In order to try and simplify the booking process, we looked into the information structure of a typical EscapeShow game:
Basic Game Details
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Date
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Time
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Time-zone
Operator Details
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Operator name
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Operator video call URL
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Operator availability
Participants Details
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Number of participants
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Participants names
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Personal details
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Group assignment
Client Use Case
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Business sector
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Private sector
Group Details
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Number of groups
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Game video call URL
Event Type
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Birthday party
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Yappy hour
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Team building etc.
Understanding that each event includes so many odds and ends, we aimed to simplify it by dividing the process into three stages and tasks made by two main roles.
Pain points distilled into three main problem areas:
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The complex and exhausting booking process
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Inflexibility in the stage of game details submission
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Inflexibility in the booking modification.
Solution
Simplicity is the name of the game
In a sea of UX portfolios, It’s hard to stand out, but it’s also hard to be unique when my users (you) have very specific needs and limitations. Understanding that the biggest challenge in hiring a UX designer is actually looking for the perfect talent in the haystack of portfolio and finding it quickly, I set my goal to create a great portfolio that will showcase my professional and personal abilities and my potential, in a way that perfectly caters to your unique needs and goals.
Ideating with three objectives in mind:
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Simplifying the booking process
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Effectively communicate the complex price model
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Allowing flexibility for game materials submission and modification
