When I asked colleagues about their pain points with e-courses, many said the courses were uninteresting and repetitive, and that they usually weren’t paying attention while completing them. This course mattered because it taught employees how to evacuate the facility in an emergency. As a manufacturing company, the facility has dealt with emergencies before, so the stakes are high.

During my time there, I saw firsthand how employees reacted to an evacuation. Many were careless about it. Some went to get food, some stayed in their offices, and others assumed it was a drill. It wasn’t. A section of the warehouse had caught fire. From this experience, I framed the problem as: How might we make an e-course engaging by making the user’s next choice actually matter? My mentor and I brainstormed several formats: simulation games, walkthroughs, a horror-style game, and interactive e-learning games. We settled on an interactive walkthrough with a touch of horror, since it would raise the sense of stakes without losing the training content.