Better Understanding Research With Personality on Just Dance

Marketing asset for Just Dance 2021's release campaign.

Personality is sometimes used as a tool to better understand players on Just Dance. Here is an example.

What is Just Dance?

Just Dance is a video game where players dance on a mix of hot new songs and good old classics. They use a movement detection device to receive a score for their performance.

Mapping The Player Journey

Just Dance 2018 was thoroughly tested & analyzed, leading to a complete rework of the user interface and onboarding experience in Just Dance 2019.

Using results from user research, designers mapped everything players had to know to enjoy an amazing play experience and worked on how to make that happen.

They mapped that into a progressive learning experience to make sure players spend most of their time enjoying the core of what makes Just Dance a great game instead of having to go through a boring tutorial.

Onboarding flow illustration for Just Dance 2019’s design documentation.

Testing & Improving

They also worked on ways to communicate those key information. As often, the first attempt didn’t quite reach the expectations, but it laid good foundations for testing, iteration & analysis.

One of the early mistake was to attempt to fix too many issues through the tutorial instead of fixing it directly at the source: in game design & interface.

Just Dance 2019 sorting tutorial, compensating for a discoverability issue in the interface itself.

Iterations of prototyping, testing and research allowed us to improve the game experience and grow as designers.

Using Personality To Better Understand Players

One of the peculiar finding was a huge difference in the impact of the Fitness Mode tutorial comparatively to other tutorials.

Just Dance 2019’s Fitness Mode tutorial.

The “Sweat mode” allows players motivated to exercise while having fun to approximately track their calories burnt thanks to the movement tracker. It’s an additional information that players with a Fitness-oriented profile value.

When performing A/B testing on the game to learn more about the best ways to teach the basics, the Sweat Mode tutorial proved way more impactful to improve discoverability than all other similar tutorials.

We delved deeper into research, using varied qualitative methods, quantitative methods and human sciences studies to better understand our different player profiles. Here is what we found:

Just Dance is a game that mainly attracts extroverted players. The core promise is made for extroverted players at its heart: have a good time dancing with your friends. Marketing assets follow classic guidelines to address extroverted people.

Just Dance 2020 marketing asset featuring multiple characters dancing with assertive poses and warm colors.

Our more fitness oriented audience, however, tends to be more introverted. They favor a solo usage of the game and enjoy an easy way to exercise while having fun in the comfort of their homes.

That difference also affects behavior: our more extroverted players value speed over precision and go straight to the dance without reading or paying attention. It often surprises our introverted user researchers during user tests.

Our more introverted players tend to navigate slower and take more time to notice the information we push throughout the learning experience.

The Sweat Mode tutorial was a good match between players profiles and players motivations. They were likely to see that tutorial and find it useful.

Our other tutorials did not match with our players’ behaviors. They were likely to skip everything without paying attention. A rework was mandatory.

Many studies exist on personality and allow us to know more about our players and how to make a great game specifically for them.

Being able to segment our audience based on their extroversion / introversion axis can allow us to make design assumptions early on in the design process that most often end up being accurate and saving us time & money in iterations to come up with a better product.

Last Words

In the end, research & iteration are key to better reach our goals and grow as designers.

Personality and human sciences can be good complementary tools to better understand our players, what they need and how to design for them.

The Wikipedia page on personality is a good entry door to the topic and references many studies to investigate should you want to use personality in your daily job.

Thanks for reading and take care,

Léo