“Mark my words, vengeance will be mine!”: A user research on Genshin fans

I was curious about the phenomenon that organized races in the Genshin Impact community have become more frequent recently. So in the first stage, I selected players who had organized the such activities as the target persona and conducted several interviews to find out the problems. In the interview, it is often those fans of characters who are considered by ordinary players as non-powerful have high enthusiasm to organize a reward race with a certain scale. In the Chinese game community, we call them “厨力党”. What these players are really trying to do is to fight with the prejudices about their favorite characters through racing, and it can be seen that this kind of activity always starts in a certain character’s group of friends.

This persona was selected because they showed strong emotion and demand tendency in the interview, and they accounted for the majority of the current organizers. Because they love this relatively weak character in the game, they often need to hold racing events to prove that the character can cope with the constantly updated game environment, so as to refute the negative opinions of some players. A racing activity, need be completed by both the organizer and participants, in order to attract players to join the activity, the activity is carried out in the way of “reward”(悬赏), the players with outstanding performance can get a bonus. Since it is a private player event and does not receive direct support from game officials, organizers said they were troubled by the amount of effort, human power and money to hold the activities. Therefore, what they need is a dedicated reward race platform and supporting tools to efficiently formulate the rules and post, as well as collect, process and file related information.

By exploring user needs and business goals, I took an organizer as a typical user and mapped her journey and story, which helped me define the scope of the project in the initial phase. This will form the basis for defining the problem statement and the associated functional specifications and content requirements to guide solution development and data collection in subsequent stage.

If you want to see the overview on the prospect of this project, you can click here.

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