Revolutionising e-learning through gamification

The Brief

Alliance City is a virtual e-learning world (centred around main character A.L.L.I.C.E) that takes users on an engaging journey from module to module, using gamification to engage users and transform their learning experience.

‘Alliance City’ is the destination point for the e-learning. Each user receives a special ‘Agent ID’ to begin their journey, where they can travel to different ‘quarters’ to access training - from learning about social insight and brand planning to audience experiences and eco-systems. Users are transported by animated trains to designated learning hubs featuring videos, resources and an online assessment to progress to the next learning stage.

Alliance City has enabled Alliance to educate and empower a global team, across 100 countries, with essential marketing knowledge to deliver against their global growth strategy.

Alliance Pharma is a leading international healthcare business, focused on delivering clinically valuable products to their patients around the world.

Working globally, Alliance needs to ensure its brands, products and services are marketed consistently and professionally. E-learning plays a crucial role in the organisation’s ongoing commitment to quality through expert marketing principles and sharing best practice.

Alliance is amid an ambitious growth strategy and delivering a consistent digital marketing experience across the global business is essential to realising this. Recognising the need for a global marketing initiative that would promote excellence internally, whilst driving better brand management moving forward, the organisation was looking for an interactive and engaging way to deliver global brand management education and support at scale, current staff and new starters.

The Solution

Through discovery we began to understand Alliance’s needs, explore their internal culture and experiment with some ideas.  Ultimately, recommending the development of a bespoke gamification-led approach to e-learning to provide an immersive and memorable experience.

From our early conversations, it became clear that our creative solution should be presented through a sci-fi lens, using a bespoke concept that would both engage and motivate Alliance’s team to complete essential learning modules.

We worked closely with MediaWorks, a digital marketing agency, throughout to ensure that the eLearning platform told a strong story and delivered an experience that was truly engaging, and these formed our guiding principles throughout our creative development process. 

The immersive world was first developed via a set of wireframes to explain the flow and demonstrate the transitions for users. Working alongside MediaWorks, our software developer created the story that now lies at the heart of Alliance’s narrative-based learning platform, offering great creative interplay and bringing modules to life.

From a design perspective, it is a highly visual approach to e-learning: graphical elements are used to great effect, with striking transitions and animations between screens and music adding suspense and urgency for users, driving a feeling of internal competition to earn learning badges and advance through levels at pace.

We worked in an agile way throughout the project, challenging ourselves and Alliance to deliver a truly creative, user led solution on a tight budget.

The tech behind the platform

Using Blazor as a front-end solution, this open-source technology enables building of interactive Web UIs using core .NET technologies.  Blazor allowed for rapid development and a streamlined framework delivery. 

Using a data layer API and administration system created using .NET Core the solution sits firmly in the Microsoft tech stack with SQL utilised as a back-end database.

The end result is an engaging front-end learning experience with extensive data-capturing possibilities for future growth and development.