Isotoma

Crisis Simulator

Polpeo

Background

Polpeo offers something both unique and vital: a crucible to test in-house social media teams from companies like P&G, all without waiting for a real crisis to erupt. It’s a thoroughly crafted challenge, where their expert team concocts complex scenarios — whether it's creating posts, responding to content, writing news articles, or publishing news reports — everything happens within a high-stakes simulation environment designed to push teams to their limit.

This isn't just a game; it's a rehearsal that demands intricate planning and robust processes. The Polpeo team relies heavily on a system which permits them to not only plan and create but also to run and nimbly adjust scenarios in real-time, ensuring every simulation hits just close enough to home.

Definition

Embarking on this endeavour required a fair bit of groundwork. Engaging with stakeholders and users, dissecting the current system, and a generous dash of observant analysis brought some clarity.

Defining a user journey map for all the different user groups and the ways they could interact was crucial, including Administrators from the Polpeo team, Facilitators for simulations, Participants from the client side, and Viewers keenly observing the unfolding drama.

The present system? It's passable but dawdles a bit, wears a somewhat dated look, and demands a notable stretch of training and workaround antics to navigate and administrate. Making it look up to date was easy, but making it intuitive and usable for every user group was going to take a bit more work.

Analysis

This was the most crucial step, enabling planning not just for now, but for where Polpeo wanted to go in the future. We sat and discussed what features were key and what we could pause for now. This was imperative as for the new system to have a good uptake it had to completely replace their old system. For launch we decided we had to include:

Redefinition of the key user groups, with usage and permissions at heart, with Administrators, Facilitators and Participants
Finessing of the planning, facilitation and real-time administration process, including joining and assigning users to teams
Revitalising and enhancing interaction, especially social media templates, with scope for adding new ones in the future
Real-time editing of a simulation so that it can adapt to how participants are doing
Importing and exporting of simulations as Excel documents
Dealing with intermittent internet connections, and picking up if a device dies
Wide device compatibility

But we kept in mind Polpeo’s future so we didn’t inadvertently lock out features:

The ability to have dry runs, and resetting of simulations
A whole breath of analytics for review and reporting
White-labelling of the system
Adaptations for different languages and upcoming social media templates (such as Clubhouse)

Polpeo also had some real world hurdles too, namely a tight-stringed budget and a short lead time. They wanted to get up and running as soon as possible so they could see a return on investment, demanding a quick and agile process.

Artefacts

Crafting was central to the task, hence a meticulous design system and some high-fidelity wireframes took centre stage. Not merely blueprints, these wireframes doubled as exportable assets for the development team, marrying aesthetic vision with functional requisites. Furthermore to the Polpeo team, they cemented the idea that we had understood and advanced their vision, creating a key line of communication for such a visual product.

Journey

The path traversed during this journey twisted through feature prioritisation, always with a considerate nod towards budget limitations and a gaze towards the horizon for upcoming adventures. Initial development focus nestled closely on the joining interface and UI library, while the client's preferred social media channels were methodically broken down into templates, maintaining a careful watch on device compatibility and scoping throughout.

The feedback we have consistently from our clients has been that Polpeo is the closest thing possible to dealing with a real crisis. The team at Isotoma has been amazing - they’re so quick to understand what we want to achieve, they challenge us (in a good way!) and always come up with suggestions for the best way to get the outcome we want. I can’t recommend Isotoma highly enough.

Kate Hartley Co-founder of Polpeo

We used Polpeo to deliver a crisis simulation for our directors — they all said they found it challenging and it really helped them to reflect on our crisis preparedness.

The crisis tool Polpeo has developed was absolutely brilliant and totally made the simulation. It was so realistic and meant our directors were having to consider how the crisis was playing out on all our channels, as they would do in an actual crisis.

Andrea Lisher Head of PR at MS Society

Outcome

Since launching the simulation software, Polpeo has successfully worked with some of the biggest brands, earning nods of approval and positive feedback from the client end. The journey doesn’t end, though, with ongoing feature rollouts and a steady pulse on prioritisation as they weave into use, keeping that invaluable client feedback always in earshot.

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