Battlefield 6:
Personas
The Battlefield franchise development teams are spread across both North America and Europe. During early development of Battlefield 6 we knew we needed to help align the development team across the franchise against the needs, motivations, and playstyles of its player base.
We developed a set of core personas to guide product and experience decisions. These personas served as a shared reference point helping the team move beyond assumptions and ground decisions in player goals, behaviors, and constraints. This case study outlines my role in shaping the personas, the research and synthesis process behind them, and how they influenced downstream design decisions throughout the project.
My Role &
Design Process:
As the UX designer responsible for persona development, I owned the end-to-end process of defining, validating, and socializing player personas for Battlefield 6. My responsibilities included:
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Partnering with research, design, and product stakeholders to align on objectives and scope
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Synthesizing qualitative and quantitative player data into clear, actionable persona frameworks
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Defining primary and secondary personas based on goals, motivations, behaviors, and constraints
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Ensuring personas reflected the realities of a live-service, multiplayer ecosystem
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Socializing personas across disciplines to establish a shared player-centric foundation for decision-making
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Maintaining and evolving personas as new insights emerged throughout development
Discovery & Alignment
I partnered with stakeholders across the franchise to establish a shared understanding of why the personas were needed and how they would be included in the design process. This included aligning on how the personas would be used to inform features such as onboarding and ensuring the teams don't treat them as a purely descriptive artifact. I created a brainstorming workshop to get a sense for how our teams were viewing our player base and their needs and pain points.
Research Synthesis
I reviewed existing research, telemetry insights, player feedback, and competitive analysis to identify behavioral patterns, motivations, and pain points across the player base.
In addition, I also sought out studies on Gen Z play habits and preferences to help bring in traits to these personas from a younger generation that we wanted to attract. Their preferences would be key to identify how to bring in new players to a franchise that has been around for over 20 years.
Persona Definition
I translated archetypes into human-centered personas, documenting goals, playstyles and frustrations.
Our Personas were defined as follows:
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New Ned:
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New to the Battlefield franchise, gen z gamer, driven by social features and gaming with friends
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Hardcore Hannah:
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A veteran player that is highly competitive and cares about rank and leaderboards and showing off achievements
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Mission Melissa:
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A player who is a completionist and story-driven player. This player will be interested in the single-player campaign and unlocking every weapon available
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Social Sam
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Highly social and cares most about playing with their core friend group. Interested in showing off their best gameplay moments.
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Persona-based User Flows
We approached personas holistically, considering not just who the players are, but how they would navigate the menu, where they would naturally focus their attention, and which touchpoints would create meaningful interactions or moments of discovery.
For each persona, we also identified strategic opportunities within the experience to gently encourage exploration of new modes and features. These flows became helpful tools in identifying our feature focus areas later in development.
Socialization & Adoption
In addition to the Persona work, I also created a presentation for the game design team to help them adopt personas in their design process. This presentation was more general to help establish understanding of the goals and outcomes of persona usage before rolling out the personas themselves.
Once the personas were aligned upon, I presented the personas to cross-functional teams and ensured they were present during UX work to help stakeholders continue to understand their value and the goals and focus for each persona type.
Next Steps
I treat personas as living artifacts, revisiting and updating them as new data and player behaviors emerged post-launch.