Gabi and Grace here, welcoming you to Part 1 of our Escape Room Series! In our combined experience, we’ve faced over 60 rooms across 8 states and 4 countries. But, of course, we’re not only escape room geeks, we’re also Interaction Nerds. Join us as we reflect and dissect our escape room experiences to pull insights informing UX design, problem-solving, and more!
Gabi, Grace, and their escape room buddies in just a few of their many successful escapes!
We’ve tried quite a variety of escape rooms, from world-renowned venues to locally-renowned venues to… whatever mall venue happens to be open on a Tuesday. We’ve had our fair share of mediocre escape rooms, which are fun nonetheless, but the great escape rooms take it to a whole new level. They’re beautifully designed, and it shows.
Note that rooms can be cool without being great. They can use the latest technology in their puzzles, involve animatronics / moving mechanisms, or otherwise create a really immersive scene. But if the puzzles don’t flow well, or if the technology isn’t consistent, those fun rooms don’t stand out.
A similar concept applies to products — a more technically advanced product doesn’t make it better. For many users, a simple, user-friendly product is better than an advanced, complex one.
Based on our experiences, we’ll present the most important things that great escape rooms do, and then generalize to the applications and principles of UX design.
The words “every clue will only be used once” at the start of an escape room are a great first sign that it will be a good experience. When you find a key, code, or prop and use it to unlock something in the room, being able to put it down and forget about it is essential to keeping your head clear to solve the next problem. Imagine if every key you used once might also work in other locks around the room. You would have to try every key on every lock you find. Under a one-hour time crunch, nobody has the time to try all those keys.
In a great escape room, there is a clear flow from one clue to the next. This doesn’t mean the room gives everything away — sometimes you’ll need to figure out the connection between clues — but players should not be expected to keep thinking about every clue they’ve seen.
We see this same concept in UX. Users should have everything they need to get to the next step, but they shouldn’t have to recall all previous steps to do so. As humans, we can only remember and operate on a small amount of information. Asking our users to do more than that makes for a frustrating escape room and a bad user experience journey.
It’s often said that the best escape rooms are those that make you feel most immersed in the theme. However, adding too many things to ‘create a realistic scene’ can have a serious negative consequence — information overload. In an escape room, information overload is a frustrating blocker to flow progress.
One time, I was in a library-themed escape room. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy reading in my free time. But I don’t enjoy reading to solve puzzles in a time-crunch situation. In fact, one of my biggest pet peeves in an escape room is a book. Or worse, a shelf of books. In this room, there were a shelf of books that were all real. I spent twenty minutes trying to decipher book pages with underlines scattered throughout. As it turns out, the book content had no relevance to the puzzles — the book-related puzzle was all about the titles.
— Grace