The Project: coLegend

coLegend is a playful personal development community (striving to be the first personal development game at some point) with the mission of creating a connected and conscious movement among its users, motivating them to continuously improve and strive to fulfill their true potential.

In order to make it easier for the user to dream big and get inspired, coLegend is set in a world that is a mixture of fantasy and real life.

The Goal: A Gamified Character

Matching this theme, we also wanted the user to be able to create a gamified character at the very beginning of their interaction with coLegend. For the user, this character would mainly serve as a visible profile to other users of the community. For coLegend, this character creation process would provide relevant information of the user's personality traits, development areas and a way of matching them with other users later on in the community.

The Design Challenge: Fun, Short & Meaningful

First Feedback Cycle

Based on the research I decided on the key questions to include, their order and phrasing.

​Out of this I created a Google Form Questionnaire and sent it to our testers for a first round of feedback.

These people are dedicated alpha users that we picked according to our target audience with the goal of testing our project live and getting regular feedback from them. They - in exchange - are able to use our product free of charge.

Based on their feedback I was able to rephrase some questions in order to not influence the user to answer in a certain way (most of the questions are not questions per se, but phrases that are to be completed by choosing one of the answer options) improve answer options that were supposed to reflect the perspective of a certain personality type by taking in suggestions from users that were themselves of that type and had a better insight in how to phrase certain things to make it sound more authentic

Personality Type Research

In order to obtain valuable information from the users through our character creation questions I researched the concepts of the 16 personality types of MBTI and aspects of the 12 archetypes.

Additionally I wanted to get insights into state of the art character creation in games and took Guild Wars 2 as an inspiration, especially looking into their storytelling and choice of questions.

My task was to create a character creation process that would be short and fun enough for the user to finish it without losing interest, integrating meaningful rewards in between that would engage the user, make them see that their choices matter and finally to ask questions that would provide valuable psychological insights for coLegend to use in later stages.

Frontend Implementation

After having incorporated the first user feedback I drafted wireframes with Adobe XD.
This was helpful to get a feeling for the mobile version. Especially when it came to

• screen interaction with the different answer options

• judging and adjusting the text length for the different answer options

Wireframes

After having a clear picture of what we wanted and gone through testing for usability mistakes with the help of the wireframes I implemented them into frontend code.

User Testing

Before deploying the character creation, I did a testing round with two of our users.
One user went through the character creation remotely on their computer, recording their test via screen recording, thinking aloud and taking screenshots of bugs and issues.
The other user did a live testing and I observed them, writing down everything I noticed during their interaction without interrupting them while testing, but asking further questions after they were done.​

This gave some further insights into

• intuitivity when interaction with the different answer options

• user emotions when receiving the reward screens and videos between different questions

• user guesses of connection between character creation and later stages

• user satisfaction with entire character creation

Final Thoughts & Learnings

Biggest challenges:

• finding a good balance in answer text options between not too much text and still conveying the right story

• going further than just a character creation and finding meaningful ways to integrate the choices into the game later on

• deciding on how much and when to tell users about the impact of their choices on their later game experience

Biggest celebrations:

• researching about existing personality typing and game character creations

• observing the users testing in the final stages of the feature and getting insights into their emotional reactions when interacting with the process

Abstracting the research into the main content and order of the character creation questions.

Life is more fun if you play games. - Roald Dahl

Crafting characters that bring stories to life.