How QuizWitz defines the roles in its community

Dear Labcats, dear developer friends

As you might know, we’re working on QuizWitz. It’s a party quiz game with its own community, something our mentor at StartIt@KBC knows a thing or two about (this is an understatement). He urged us to get to the bottom of our platform and its future users. This post is an overview of what we defined so far. (You can also read this post on Gamasutra!)

The Community

A community is like a little society in itself, and in a society everyone fulfills another role, just like in real life. In QuizWitz, users will do very different things depending on why they join or come back to the game. From the ‘why’ we can also deduct the ‘what’, and that’s a valuable insight for any developer.

If we know how and why it will be used, we can not only understand our users better, we can reach out to them and provide the right care and features. This means it’s not only a marketing tool to get to know your future players better. It serves a bigger purpose. To do this exercise, we imagined QuizWitz in 5 years time, being a vibrant ecosystem.

The Roles

We decided to define 4 roles for our community. We imagine each of them has a preference in terms of features. First of all, we tried to define the ‘why’ and ‘what’ starting from our most important game elements.

The overview below shows our three different feature categories: The multiplayer mode, the community network and the single player mode. Depending on why the user joins the community, he or she will have other goals. Those are shown between the brackets behind the role names. The colored features are the favorites per role.

As you can see, the first role we call the Tourist. They’re a fun bunch looking for a quick game with friends or family. They also like to explore and play single player mode if struck by boredom. This role doesn’t register upfront and doesn’t engage too much in the community.

The Journalists are a whole other story. They love to mingle with other users and let their voice be heard. They register to comment and rate rounds, as well as play quick games against friends. They love a bit of everything and like to test their knowledge against Professors.

As Famous Quizzers play to grow in the multiplayer rankings, they will organize fun evenings for their friends and family. They also love to show them who knows the most about these topics. They will create their own rounds about topics in which they feel other quiz creators missed things.

Professors like to play against other Professors, but their favor testing their knowledge about different kinds of trivia. They love to explore the network on their own and give feedback, as well as create unique quiz rounds about topics they know much about.

Conclusion

We believe QuizWitz has everything to facilitate these different roles, though we still have a huge job ahead of us. It’s a good thing we’re no quitters! Every community needs its players, so please do share the QuizWitz name and fame.

If you have any thoughts or comments about these roles, please do leave your paw in the comments below or tell us on Facebook, Twitter or in an email!

Thanks a lot and don’t forget to kiss the cat goodnight!

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