WEEK 2 - MARKETING AND TICKETING

This sample profile photo is not the final version. We will modify the visuals after critiques.

Accomplished this week:

For the past week, the tasks that have been accomplished by Marketing and Ticketing team including but not limited to designing a prototype for the escape room website, exploring and demoing feasible database solutions for our booking system, setting up social media accounts for promotion purpose, designing posters with a secret Easter egg and creating contents for multiple social media accounts. 

The website prototype is based on the team discussion on October 31. Varun did the paper wireframes at first, then Jiaming set up a Figma design doc so every team member can get access to the design process without many overlapping works. 

Website Prototype 

Claire (Yichen) is responsible for designing the About Us page and Contact Us page. After finishing the wireframes of these pages on Figma, she requested the page contents from the writing team. The About Us page is a brief introduction to our teams and their responsibilities. To make the language on this page is concise and accurate, she requested help from the writing team. Thanks for the writers' kindly help, the contents on these pages have almost been done. Also, it'll be nice to have photos of our creative teams. She just requested the team photo on our Slack channel today. 

Haichen designed the website homepage. Audiences will be able to know the basic information about our escape room game here. The writing team also helped him with writing the escape room introduction. 

Since the students may have questions on our escape room, Zhengfan designed a FAQ page and listed and wrote all the possible questions. These questions include the ticket price, potential player amount, location, etc. To keep visual consistency, Jiaming also provided art assets for these webpage pages. 

Our team also tried several ticketing system solutions last week. Jiaming found that the Wix has a booking system plugin. But after testing, this plugin only allowed the user to select an ideal date and shoot an email to the administrator. This is sort of different from our expectations. Then he tried the Calendly. This web application allows the user to choose the time slot, but it's not perfectly fit our requirements. The Calendly allows the users to select specific time slots. But it'll be impossible to fill two tiny groups or individuals to the same time slot. Each time slot can only fit one group. It'll be impossible to book a ticket alone.  

Thus, Varun then suggested that it'll be better to customize our booking system. According to his experience of gathering experiment participants for his graduate thesis. He would use phpMyAdmin to manage the booking information and shoot related emails. Varun developed a demo last week and explained the feasibility to our team. For the front-end part, he explored the Wordpress and GoDaddy. Compare to the Wordpress, GoDaddy would be more affordable. This will cost about 40 bucks per year. He will update the final budget after finishing the website demo.

Poster Drafts

The poster drafts have been finished last week by Jiaming. Inspired by Xinxin's nice idea. Jiaming designed and prototyped an Easter egg puzzle in the posters with Xinxin. It'll be a nice marketing strategy for grabbing students' attention. In terms of game immersion, this could also extend the story in our escape room to reality and create an immersive environment on our campus. 

To keep the visual consistency, Jiaming created an art channel on our Slack. Then visual artists in different teams can share the same art assets. According to feedbacks on Thursday's presentation, it seems that students and professors have good ideas and references for our poster design. After the presentation, he created a mood board Google slide then everyone can put their style preferences there. This could be a valuable reference material for our visual artist.

Social Media Profile Photos, Posts Instagram Stories (View Content)

Based on the feedback, Jiaming drafted some cover pictures for multiple social media accounts, like profile and header photos for Facebook and Twitter, Instagram story, etc. Varun had set up Instagram and Twitter accounts for our escape room and Zhengfan created a Facebook event so WPI students can find our activity info there. So far, these accounts are empty and we will add content on the following week. Also, posters and social media pictures are not the final versions. Jiaming will update the visuals based on other teams' and professors' feedback.

Plus, this Monday (November 11th), Zhengfan and Jiaming helped the Set Design and Building team with moving the shelf, TV, sofa, and cabinet from the IMGD lounge to the IMGD digital lab.

Planned for next week:

For the website demo:

We will develop a website demo based on last week's prototype. The website content is already there. So the developers will inspect the UI spec and implement it. We'll also test it after we finish this.

For ticking system:

Based on phpMyAdmin and the existing database demo, we'll test and modify the database of this booking system.

For posters:

Each team member will design some visual assets, like logos, for the poster and social media accounts. We'll keep gathering feedback from other teams and professors to modify our posters. Also, we'll figure out the rules and budgets of printing and pasting the posters. 

For social media accounts:

We will update the profile photos, headers, and banner on our social media accounts. Then we will create some attractive content and post them on these accounts for promotion purposes. We will request the writing team to help us to polish the promotion content.