How to Make a Moscow Mule

A top-shelf liquor brand is looking to boost sales, and they turn to an instructional designer to inform their brand reps, salespeople, and distribution partners about why their product is the best choice for a popular drink.

This is a gamified training in which learners will discover why Bebida Especial's vodka stands out for creating the best-tasting Moscow Mule, learn the precise art of mixing the drink using the correct ingredients and measurements, and understand the significance of serving it in the proper vessel. This course inspires learners to think outside the box by proposing innovative variations of the Moscow Mule and incorporating various flavors and garnishes, thereby expanding cocktail menus and enhancing sales opportunities.

• Audience: Salespeople and distribution partners of a spirits company
• Responsibilities: Visual Design, eLearning Development, Instructional Design
• Tools Used: Articulate Storyline, Adobe Creative Cloud

Overview

I came across this challenge when a colleague shared Tim Slade's LinkedIn post about it. You can find more details about the challenge on Slade's site, The Elearning Designer’s Academy. I was intrigued because I'm familiar with the audience and subject matter, having recently completed a microlearning project related to cocktails.

During the analysis phase of the project, I consulted with friends in the industry to understand the audience's preferences. The consensus was that the training should be concise, engaging, and mobile-friendly. In response to this feedback, I decided to condense the history of the cocktail into a single slide. Additionally, I chose to incorporate gamification into the training to enhance learner engagement. When storyboarding, I opted for a mobile-friendly aspect ratio, knowing that I would need to carefully manage the number of elements on the screen.

Since I had built out most of the game logic in my recent cocktail project, the main challenge was incorporating the company’s brand and styling into the interaction. I achieved this by experimenting with different backgrounds, button colors, and themes in XD.

Gamification

The gamification element adds fun and increases learner engagement. This training could also be implemented on an LMS that tracks learners’ scores and creates a leaderboard, with incentives going to those with perfect scores. To see more about how I mapped out the game logic, check out this process write-up.

Garnish section

I knew my cocktail mixing interaction was solid, but for this project I also needed to incorporate a garnish section. I used a drag-and-drop scenario to mirror the drink-mixing interaction.

Takeaways

Some of my favorite projects are those with real-world outcomes, like, in this case, a well-made classic cocktail, so this was thoroughly enjoyable to design and develop.