An interactive product experience built to launch the Galaxy Note. Device features became puzzle mechanics inside a 4-minute time-loop adventure, designed to reveal the phone's capabilities through play, not advertising.
The Galaxy Note's differentiators, the S Pen, advanced camera, multi-window, would become the tools a player needed to survive a time-loop adventure on a mysterious island. The UX challenge was extraordinary: design an immersive experience that felt like play, not advertising, within a 4-minute constraint that reset every attempt.
The project was a collaboration between Samsung Brasil and Escape 60, a live-experience company specializing in escape room design. My role was to define the experience architecture: how device features would translate into puzzle mechanics, how information would be structured across a 4-minute window, and how each interaction would carry both narrative weight and product demonstration value.
Make a product launch feel like discovery. Every feature of the Galaxy Note had to emerge through gameplay, not instruction. The product should disappear inside the narrative.
Four minutes. One loop. Every screen, transition and interaction had to be completable within the window. Ruthless information architecture was not a principle, it was a requirement.
Map device features first, script second. By building the interaction vocabulary before the narrative existed, the design shaped the story rather than adapting to it.
When I joined the project, Escape 60 had not yet completed the narrative. I had one week to produce wireframes with only the Galaxy Note feature set and a rough story outline as input. The standard design process assumes a defined brief. This project required inverting that assumption.
My first decision was to build a feature-to-interaction mapping before doing anything visual. If the S Pen exists, what kind of puzzle requires writing? If multi-window exists, what kind of information requires two surfaces simultaneously? If the camera exists, what kind of clue can only be decoded through a lens?
This gave me something rare in fast-moving project work: I influenced the script rather than designing to it. The interaction vocabulary was defined before the story existed, which meant the narrative team at Escape 60 had a structured framework to write into. Design thinking applied upstream of creative direction.
A player should not be able to imagine this game on a different phone. The Note8 features were not bolted on as moments of demonstration, they were load-bearing elements of the experience architecture. Remove any one of them and the game collapses.
Players write a riddle solution with the S Pen to unlock the next island clue. The writing is the story, not the feature. The product disappears into the narrative.
Each loop reveals one new narrative layer. Players feel progress even across resets, building a sense of expertise and mastery rather than failure and repetition.
The game world is divided into distinct zones. Each zone holds one active riddle. Players navigate physical space in the game, which organizes cognitive load naturally. Complexity hidden inside geography.
Conversation and riddle layers were designed with distinct visual registers, different typographic weight, spatial placement and interactive affordances, allowing both to coexist without competing for attention.
When the script arrived, the challenge shifted from conceptual to structural. My objective was to transfer all the storytelling into a legible and precise interface. Every screen had to be completable within the time constraint, with no padding, no dead ends and no slow-loading states.
The first prototype was built in InVision at low fidelity. The objective was to test timing, task completability and interaction clarity before any visual polish was applied. A prototype that serves as both UX testing instrument and engineering documentation is worth three separate deliverables.
Each screen and transition was timed against the loop constraint. Any state that could not be completed in time was redesigned or removed. The clock was the design brief.
Six users tested the prototype in a controlled session. The objective was not aesthetic feedback but behavioral observation: where did players slow down, where did they fail, where did the riddle logic break.
The same prototype served as the engineering specification. Annotations defined device-feature triggers, transition logic and state changes, removing ambiguity from the handoff.
The whole team worked in partnership from the beginning. The interaction architecture defined the spatial logic and information hierarchy. The visual execution brought atmosphere, texture and the sense of a world worth exploring within a four-minute window.
Cards, overlays, writing surfaces and camera viewfinders each carried dual meaning: narrative object and product feature. The visual design reinforced this duality without breaking immersion.
The project created significant traction. Samsung produced a dedicated video case study to document the results. The experience confirmed a principle carried forward into every engagement-focused design project since: when the product is the experience, the audience stops being an audience.
This was one of the most structurally complex projects I had worked on at that stage of my career. The absence of a script was not a gap, it was a design opportunity. Looking back, the most important work happened before the first wireframe: building the vocabulary that everything else would be written into.
The 96% engagement result was not the product of clever visual design. It was the product of a precise interaction architecture where every element served a dual purpose: narrative and product proof simultaneously.