Why do we play poker on Internet? From my experience there are at least four major reasons.

The four reasons:

Get recognition

Win money

For entertainment

Spend time with friends

Get recognition

A good poker player wants to recognised for his skills. Players can be recoginised in many different ways. Both by the poker site but also by having some kind of status on players. These players tend to stick to a few different poker sites since they have to play often to gain the status they want.

Win money

Players who play to win are usually play on many different poker sites and try to find the best bonuses available. They don’t care that much about the design as long as there are possibilites to win money.

For entertainment

Players who like to play strategic games and enjoys the excitement and the tactial part of the poker game. They enjoy the design and features in the poker client but get frustrated when things doesn’t work as they think and move on to a different poker site.

Spend time with friends

It isn’t very easy to socialise when playing poker. The chat windows are often very small and players mainly makes comments when they loose a hand. But there are ways to increase possibilites to make friends and chat with them. Players in this category want to be able to play on their social networks where their friends are.

It is really important to figure out why people play poker and prioritize your target groups when you design your poker software! For my iPhone poker app I’ll focus on all groups except the ones interesting in winning money (this is because it is not legal to play poker for money). So my focus will be to design afor fun poker app with great user experience and social features.

/Staffan