Casino Personas
A “Persona” is a fictional representation of an actual user and is applied in the early stages of product development or product redesign. Personas are vital to the success of a product because they drive design decisions by taking common user needs and bringing them to the forefront of planning before design has actually started. Personas provide the team with a shared understanding of users in terms of goals and capabilities. Once Personas are defined, going through a task analysis exercise with scenarios will offer an inexpensive way to test and prioritize features throughout the development (see lesson #2 in the blog Responsive Design: Getting started).
The Benefits of Persona Development
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According to the Market Segmentation exercise from the Las Vegas Visitor Profile (2018), published online here and prepared for the Las Vegas Convention, there are four unique casino resort personas: Convention Visitors, Package Purchasers, General Tourists, and Casino Guests.
If you don’t think Personas are worth the trouble, think again. Benefits include:
- Personas give stakeholders an opportunity to discuss critical features of a redesign: This is especially helpful when you have multiple stakeholders with different ideas about what needs to be developed first. Using Personas to walk stakeholders through common interactions unveils frustrations and pain-points that will help clarify actual user priorities over the stakeholder’s personal wish list.
- They help team members share a consistent understanding of the user group: Personas take data and make the stories more compelling and fun, thus making them easier to remember and consider when the team is working towards a solution – together.
- Personas help designers develop informed wireframes and site architecture: Since Personas focus on the needs of the users, the team can walk through scenarios and determine optimal placement of content to specifically support the goal of the product. This is vital to the success of a website or application, and will save your client thousands of dollars and/or man-hours reworking a product after it’s launched (and “officially” tested by actual users).
- Personas provide a “face” to the user story, creating more empathy and understanding about the person using the product: This prevents designers and developers from applying their own mental models to the product design which may not align with actual user needs.
Collecting Data to Make Persona’s
Because Personas are fictional representations of actual users, they’ll only work if you fully understand who your users are – or will be. The more information you have, the better. Generally, 4-7 Personas (whittled down from several user groups) are sufficient to capture and document a majority of user requirements.
For projects that have several user groups, it’s helpful to group them into buckets with similarities, thus narrowing down the user groups into 4-7 specific profiles.
Depending on your project, you may have past users or you may not. Luckily, there are a variety of methods to collect data for either situation.
For existing users:
- User Interviews are by far the most useful. After several interviews you will notice patterns that emerge from each person, which should be included on the persona for that target audience group.
- Reviewing help desk calls and website feedback can also yield important feedback. So can surveys and questionnaires, focus groups, and purchase records.
- Existing clients can submit surveys, which are another cheap and effective way to collect information about users who are in various locations. Sometimes it’s helpful to offer incentives like a gift card, or a chance to win something for participating in the survey.
For non-existing users:
- Use original research by brainstorming personas using the product goals and purpose as a starting point.
- Leverage stakeholders for more information on who they believe their customer base will be. They may be able to provide contacts to work with.
Once you have this information, you can pull together the Persona stories for each user group. For this part, you only need your imagination.
What Makes Up a Persona?
Personas generally include the following key pieces of information:
- Persona Group (For example; sales manager)
- Fictional name (For example; “Government Gail”)
- Job titles and major responsibilities
- Optional: A quote this person would say that defines them.
- Demographics such as age, education, ethnicity, and family status
- The goals and tasks these people are trying to accomplish on your website or application
- Pain points or frustrations
- Technical experience and background
- Their working environment: Are they in an office on Wall Street with a lot of distractions or do they work in a library?
- Casual photos: Using realistic photos is always best. Photos from dating sites or even pulling from an image search is better than using photos from a stock photography website. Jonathan Abbott even created a website full of photos that can be used for persona development efforts!
A variety of Persona templates are available online. These can be used as-is or modified to better fit your products user needs and experiences. Here are just a few places you can download or review persona templates:
- http://www.romanpichler.com/tools/persona-template/
References:
Prior to social games and free2play, there hasn’t been much need to ‘reinvent’ the wheel in casinos games as most feel that the most popular casino games are good as is as they are tried and true. Slots are slots, blackjack is blackjack, poker is poker… and with this kind of mentality, it’s no wonder casino games have seen such little innovation in the last few decades compared to other game genres. But with the rise of social games and technology, the landscape for casino innovation has changed. Technology has allowed us to map out in real time the behaviors of gamers & gamblers alike, and this data has shown trends, like in any other industry, we need to keep up as designers and operators.
A big common mistake I see when people launch a new social casino title is thinking they can just ‘socialize’ a casino game but creating a social wrapper around the games and thinking it will just work. I see social casino products that have everything plus the kitchen sink including leaderboards, badging systems, bonusing systems, progressive leveling, farm building, inventory collections blah blah… and still come out to be a rather dry and dull experience. While the general idea may be there, the execution of why & when may not be... and as we all know execution is everything.
So today, we will focus on particularly gambling personas. We need to understand the difference between the gambler psychology vs. the casual player in order to design features for them that matter.
Casino Personas En
To design features that will matter to the gambling player, we need to first understand why people gamble. From there we then create features that can possibly change habits and influence behaviors. This kind of design R&D should ideally come before any team starts to design game features which many times isn’t the case.
So why do people gamble?
What motivates people to gamble is different from person to person. Rarely it's one reason, but a combination of multiple reasons. A better question to ask rather than 'Why do people gamble?' is 'What do people get out of gambling?'. These questions virtually result in the same answers, but the latter I personally find is more helpful in trying to pinpoint motivators.
So what do people get out of gambling?
I believe it is safe to say that the majority of people don’t want to lose. Even those that seem they like losing, such as those degenerate masochists like my father, they don’t like it, but are rather use to it. So for simplicity sake, everyone has the desire to win is our start and concluding that winning is the common motivator for all players. People play games to win something. So let's explore this 'something'? I call these individual win motivators 'winning elements'.
Winning elements are essentially positive drivers as to why one may play/gamble and they include:
- Entertainment (Having fun)
- Leisure (Past time, kill boredom)
- Feel Good (Pride, Confidence)
- Escapism (Vacation, Zone out)
- Socialization (Be a part of the excitement)
- Financial/Value Gain (Money, Status, Tangible Rewards)
- Mastery (Skills, Level up)
So you can see there are many different reasons for why people may gamble, and these reasons can also change depending on other external & internal circumstances and motivators. Now that we know that what motivates one player may not necessarily motivate another, what does industry data tell us about what attracts users related to casino:
Persona 5 Casino Personas
- More than 60 percent of those surveyed favored small and frequent payouts over larger, sporadic payouts;
- 52 percent of the respondents played video poker, while about 24 percent played video blackjack;
- Only 33 percent like slot machines with progressive jackpots, but of those who did, an overwhelming 70 percent said their favorite game was Wheel of Fortune;
- Women are more into functional motives – the social experience, the excitement and the fun – whereas men tend to look more at the financial rewards. Male gamblers care more about money;
- The most common profile of a real money land-based slot machine enthusiast was a female homeowner, between the ages of 55 and 60, with at least some college education and an annual household income of more than $55,000. The most common profile for a social casino gamer is younger, which are women 35-45, but not too far ahead of the 45-55 group. The male to female ratio is also close in gap with males 45%, females 55%.
- Only 18.9 percent said having a themed game was important. Among those who liked themed games, 23.8 percent would choose a board game, 60.8 percent would choose a game show theme, and 56.8 percent liked action movie themes (respondents could choose more than one category);
- The most popular video poker games were “Jacks or Better” (31.8 percent), followed by “Deuces Wild” (21 percent) and “Double Double Bonus” (16.9 percent).
- Players that engage with a brand at multiple touch-points also tend to engage at a deeper level rather than cannibalize each other. (IE. players that play on social casino online that also visit a land-based casino, purchase and have bigger lifetime values)
Src: My experience & Sandy Chen, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management Research on Slot Machine Profiles. 2013
Casio Personal Organizer
What are the types of gamblers or social casino players? What are the differences between social casino gamers and real money casino gamblers? Follow me as I will talk about this in my next post. I also tweet @astrogurl. Thanks for reading & happy designing! :)