Creating and using personas

• A great tool to design for an audience
• Practicality: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
• Theoretical: ♥ ♥ ♥ • •

I considered myself an avid gamer and I’d been designing games for about 5 years when I first joined casual game publisher and developer GameHouse more than a decade ago. I was so surprised when I first played “Delicious Taste of Fame; a casual game aimed at a female audience, in the time management genre. Hiding underneath the sweet story of Emily trying to reach the next milestone in her career was a brutal game. When I first started playing I remember clearly thinking “How and in what way is this game casual? What are these women doing in their tea?” The tempo and memorization required was killing me and needless to say, I was really bad at this game. I was surprised and scared. I realized I didn’t know a thing about this audience! 

This was back in ancient times, when GameHouse was a PC first game publisher and developer. And luckily, I got to know Marie and Sophie, who represented our target audience throughout the company. 

I remember that Marie and Sophie were a little intimidated by PC usage and sometimes afraid to mess things up. We learned that games shouldn’t just be made “girlish”, but need to be designed from the ground up to meet their taste in challenges, themes and stories. All these things sound so completely obvious now.

We always referred to Marie and Sophie in almost any of our day-to-day discussions. “What would Marie and Sophie think about this feature” and “how will Marie and Sophie interact with this item?” were common phrases around the company. I learned so much about our target audience through their shared perceptions, their behavior and their candid sharing of experiences. But Marie and Sophie were not real people, they were personas.

What are personas?

My interpretation is that personas are a design tool. They can help with the day-to-day decision making as well as informing strategic long term choices. Personas describe fictional people that represent an archetypical subsection of a particular target audience. Although personas are fictional, they are not made up but based on qualitative and quantitative research. The better the research and the more people are involved, the more informed the personas will be and the better the personas represent their respective target audience and the better they serve the design of the product.

How to create great personas?

I’m going to take an a-typical stance to what I see happening a lot in our industry. Typically for any target audience research, the audience is pre-segmented or filtered based on a particular product or game, narrowed down from the larger group to get an even more zoomed in and focused group of players. The common idea is that “players that like your game” represent the best possible target audience for your game AND as a consequence of that argumentation the game should be made for that group of people.

This leads to the creation of a game specific niche audience, filtered based on what your game offers. 

Narrowing your research to a game’s niche leads to games designed for that niche

However, we need to create a mass-market product and want to create a product that attracts not just the fans of a particular genre or game, but expands the market. Pre-segmenting to a smaller audience is the opposite of what we’re after, we seek not to narrow down our field of view, but expand it. And as personas are a design tool, you CAN use it to expand your view if you allow it to inform you about a broader audience, rather than just limit your view to your game’s particular niche. When designing for the mass, you need to address many perspectives. 

This is why we did it differently and looked at our gaming community at large, including women that do not self identify as mobile game players, or fans of particular genres. 

Behavior based Personas

This resulted in a large-scale investigation amongst our target audience, which means in our case, women of all ages and all stages of life. All of the research, the aggregation, the creation of surveys with thousands of respondents and the conducting of dozens of interviews with women across the globe was done by my lovely colleague Poornima Kumar, who deserves full credit for all of the findings we did.

From all of her qualitative and quantitative research particular similarities started to emerge and several segments started to appear.

Research a broad audience and your findings may lead to reaching a broader audience

Unlike most personas research, we didn’t segment on age or profession, but we specifically looked at segments that displayed similar game and lifestyle profiles. In particular, how do games fit their lives and needs? What do games add to the lives of our audience and what do they seek that we might not yet offer?

Our personas represent behavioral characteristics

From each of these segments we created 1 archetypal persona that represents the total segment. This persona is described as if it was a real person, with a life we recognize and with specific traits and particularities.

The idea of personas is that designing for a specific person is way more natural and easy then designing for a group, as a person can be imagined easily and solutions are tailored for that individual. Because you can imagine a persona the same way as you can think of a friend or a neighbor, it becomes easier to imagine if a decision would fit well with that person. Personas afford anyone in the team to think along with the design of the product, the company strategy and creation of creatives.

With this method we identified 5 personas that use their games differently throughout their days. 

Our Personas

In total we have discovered 5 different personas.

We recognize that each person is unique and that many women might either recognize parts of multiple personas or do not recognize themselves in any of these. That is perfectly fine. However, our research suggests that with these 5 we have captured a large majority of behaviors and characteristics that will help us make better decisions and connect with most women players.

How to use personas in your designs

What makes personas particularly useful as a design tool is that it allows you to think clearly how this person would react and interact with your product currently in its current form.

How would Time Stealer Tina play your game? What features would she love and what things would she find annoying? As some-one who is pressed for time constantly and seeks to escape this constant pressure she’d love to be able to “escape” her busy life, even if it is only for a few minutes. She’d love to start and finish a small challenge but she’d also love to immerse herself in a “different world”. Maybe a lot of smaller challenges contribute to a larger setting where she could get lost in. These micro breaks allow Tina to refuel just enough to do her next task in real life.

Clearly Organizer Olivia plays her game differently with dedicated and long periods of me-time. But both could enjoy the same game, especially if these smaller tasks are part of a larger story and diverse enough to overcome any boring repetition if played for longer stretches of time. Both personas would enjoy a story, but may require different features to enjoy the fullest. For instance, Time Stealer Tina might want to skip the story during her in between tasks microbreak in order to get a bit more progress in, but at night she might want to check out these stories and find out what happened. Olivia would probably have the time to watch the story involved as she progresses through the game. 

Using personas that are based on behavior makes it so much easier to think about their wants and needs from a game, allowing you to shine a different light on the same game features. 

Continuous development

It is still a long way before our new personas become embedded in the same way in our company like Marie and Sophie once were. Personas work best when they can be vividly remembered as if they are real people. When there are active debates on whether or not Heather would buy a particular in app purchase or if Tina would watch an ad in her 3 minutes of spare time waiting for her kid to come out of school.

And although our personas are fully developed, with names, a life and gaming preferences, we’ll continue to investigate and add new research. Currently I’m looking into player motivations and see if we can cross reference our research to other sources of knowledge such as those from Liquid and Grid and Quantic Foundry’s player motivation model.

Personas need to start living in our heads and continuously be refined, and then I’m sure that they will prove to be as useful now as Marie and Sophie were back in the days.