Safety Awareness Game and Site

CLIENT

AGENCY

PLAY GAME

CHALLENGE

Create a captivating online destination for The Port Authority’s Safety First campaign that both engages and educates.

SOLUTION

An immersive web game built for desktop and mobile that brings to life multiple environments with dangerous characters and situations using beautifully stylized illustrations. The user is challenged to identify suspicious activity before the clock runs out.

After discussing the ‘Big Idea’ with the client, I saw an excellent opportunity to create something fun and engaging while achieving the business goal of teaching safety. The first step was to fully understand what The Port Authority wanted to accomplish with the Safety First campaign.  The plan was for commuters to be informed of suspicious activity and know how to report it to the nearest authority or call the dedicated 1-800 number.  Also, getting to know the user and their needs was essential. After talking with as many potential users as possible, it was clear we’d need to captivate the users’ limited attention if we expected them to stick around and learn. For inspiration, I scoured the web and app stores for entertaining games that involved learning.  I didn’t find anything that was apples-to-apples but did discover some excellent approaches to exciting users. The biggest project constraints were time (as always) and the requirement of showing a non-trivial number of examples of suspicious behavior.

Now, armed with a deep understanding of the problem domain, I was able to work out a great solution. I knew I wanted to use Inductive Learning to train commuters to be aware of potential dangers. This demanded that the game teaches by showing examples of dangerous situations. The conclusion was to build a game that had users identify suspicious activity in the context of common commuter travel environments (bus station, airport, subway). A wide net was cast to find a brilliant illustrator that could create engaging environments and characters to give life to the game.  The game uses a classic gamification strategy to drive engagement. It also includes socially sharable achievements to further reach and awareness.

Although there was limited time and budget for user testing, I continually tested the game and the website that housed it with participants from my friends and family network to ensure we were on the right track. Fortunately, everyone loved the gaming experience, and updates to the UX were minimal.

RESULTS

The site remains a success year after year with solid engagement.