Prathima's Miles & Milestones

• Personas are meant to help a marketing team develop a mental picture or a representation of their main user segments.
• An effective collection of personas already exists in the data that you’ve gathered with your analytics and marketing efforts, you just have to connect the dots and put it together.
• Some things are obvious, like geographic location, ages and genders of your users, and even habits like session time and the time of day they play.
• Their in-game spending habits are important as well, along with their in-game behavior in regard to taking risks or speeding through a game (the hare versus the tortoise), preferring to grind out and quest (slow and steady wins the race)
• Some others might be less obvious like whether they play socially with friends or they are more of a loner (if your game offers those options)

There are some key questions to ask yourself during this all-important phase of persona creation, such as…

• What are the goals of this particular user/persona/segment, and how they are aligned with the goals or outcome of the game?
• Why does this user/persona/segment play this game?
• What is their age, location, gender, and professional background? What are their other hobbies? What type of non-gaming entertainment are they drawn to?
• What social media platforms and other online communities does this user/persona/audience segment use and frequent?
• What type of device do they use?
• How much do they spend gaming or on the web in general?
• What times of the day/days of the week do they play the game? How often?
• What are they motivated by and what are they are looking to get out of playing your game (or gaming in general)?