Wheelmates
The Road Safety Commission’s Wheelmates campaign promotes safe driving habits among young drivers, especially as they head to Leavers. To support and extend the campaign, Wheelmates Road Quests, and supporting Wheelmates website, form the foundation of an innovative online platform that equips young drivers with real-world road safety skills and guidance on how to navigate various tricky driving situations.
CHALLENGE
Young drivers aged 16-25 represent one of the most vulnerable demographics on WA roads. While they are digital natives who consume much of their content online, traditional road safety education often struggles to resonate with them, feeling didactic or irrelevant. The critical challenge was to move beyond simply outlining rules and instead equip these novice drivers with practical decision-making skills for complex, "iffy and tricky situations" they might not encounter daily, or only understand once it's too late. The goal was to create an engaging, experiential, and highly relatable platform that encourages proactive safety habits, particularly around critical periods such as the annual Leavers period, longer road trips, and nights out.
SOLUTION
To address this critical need for dynamic and relevant road safety education, the 'Wheelmates' platform was developed with a multi-faceted approach designed to engage, educate, and empower, based on the simple truth that "experience is the best teacher."
Wheelmates Road Quests: A "Choose Your Own Adventure" game that immerses young drivers in confusing driving scenarios, educating through a gamified approach to different driving situations.
The Wheelmates Platform: An innovative online hub specifically tailored to young people, leveraging modern web technologies to deliver an engaging and informative experience.
Select a driver and ride, then hit the road
Trip Down South: Focusing on planning and managing a longer road trip safely.
A Night Out: Exploring safe choices around transport before and after social events with friends.
Experiential Learning
The game goes beyond basic rules, presenting players with complex dilemmas such as responding to an ambulance at a red light, handling a vehicle breakdown in an unexpected location, navigating booze bus checkpoints, and managing road rage incidents. This experiential approach aims to develop critical thinking and proactive safety habits.
Complementing the interactive game, the Wheelmates website provides a wealth of practical information, clear checklists, essential tips, and summarised content.
The platform boasts a fresh, vibrant visual identity and "fun and fresh" copywriting, including TL,DR's on each page, ensuring it feels relevant and relatable to young people, distinguishing it from typical road safety websites. This content is tailored to help young drivers understand the process and requirements of getting their licence, preparing for trips, and maintaining safe driving practices, reinforcing the lessons learned in Road Quests.
Tech wise, the platform was built on the Road Safety Commission's Umbraco Cloud CMS, while the interactive game was developed using the React JavaScript framework, ensuring a smooth, accessible experience across various devices.
Wheelmates be real ones
The launch was supported by a 'Be a Wheelmate' digital campaign and on-ground team members at events like the Leavers period, aiming to drive significant engagement with the platform.
