Project Overview

Becoming a victim of a phishing scam can have devastating consequences, and spotting them is harder than ever. Scammers have become adept at creating emails that seem surprisingly authentic in order to trick a person into sharing personal information.

Learning how to spot phishing emails is.....not the most exciting thing to do. Just thinking about phishing attempts and the fear of becoming a victim of one is stressful, so naturally people likely aren't very excited about learning how to spot them. Traditional learning exercises for spotting phishing attempts are dry, boring, intimidating, and often use fear to scare people into becoming more aware of the tricks scammers use.

That's why when I was asked to create a short training exercise to help employees at my organization become better at spotting phishing attempts, I took a different approach. I created a gamified experience that lets users practice spotting phishing emails in a risk-free environment using fun graphics and animations in a beautiful underwater theme with colorful fish. The result is a learning experience that is stress-free and fun!

Design Decisions

Gamified Underwater Theme

I used the "phish" term to create a "fish" themed experience with fun, colorful graphics and animations. This shifted the focus from a topic that is serious and potentially dangerous to something more fun and inviting which helps the learner relax and learn how to spot phishing attempts with better focus.

Users can choose individual tasks to learn to complete, use the 'Play All' option to go through the entire simulation, or enter Practice mode to test their skills

When the user returns to the menu, they see a notification of which tasks in the simulation they have already viewed, indicated by a checkmark

On-Demand Reminders of Phishing Features

There are many ways to spot a phishing email attempt. Accordingly, it can be difficult to remember them all when you're just learning. So, in this learning experience, when the user is presented with an email and must decide if is safe, they have access to reminders of different phishing features which helps them learn.

Labels to Show Phishing Features

When a user has decided an email is safe or dangerous, they are presented with an opportunity to see the parts of the email that indicate a phishing attempt. This is where the real learning happens!

Results Screen that Allows Acess to the Emails for Review

After the user has either caught all the phishing attempts or allowed the emails to pass through, they are presented with a results screen showing them how they did. To aid in the learning, the user can access a review of each of the emails right from the results screen.

In practice mode, the user is presented with real-world situations and must choose the correct way to use the software to complete a specific task

If the user chooses incorrectly, they are presented with a hint to help them correct the mistake

Photorealistic Characters

I decided to use photorealistic characters because of the seriousness of the topic of this course. I felt that using illustrated characters would undermine the seriousness because illustrated characters typically invoke a sense of whimsy, which is not the tone I wanted to use for this project.

Branded Visuals

As this was designed for a particular client, I incorporated the company's logo and color scheme throughout the entire project, not only giving it a unified look, but a constant reminder of the source of this course content (Note: actual logo removed in these screenshots to respect the client's proprietary assets)

Realistic Audio

When a person experiences an actual tornado event and is indoors, the person is likely to hear many noises that add to the stress of the situation, like sirens, alarms, and concerned comments from nearby people. Many of those sounds were added to this module to try to put the user in a situation as close to what they would actually experience in the event of a tornado.

Full User Control

I wanted to make sure the user has full control of their experience in this course. Accordingly, on all slides, users are able to navigate back to the main menu, the menu for the section they are currently in, and, where applicable, to the previous slide. In addition, while the user is forced to listen to the stressful audio sounds at the beginning of the tornado safety module, eventually they are allowed to toggle that audio on and off.