Unfold Personality Test APp:
Rethinking personality tests to destigmatize accessible mental health
Role:
Sole Product Designer
Duration:
6wks
Nov - DEC 2023
Tools:
Figma
Pivotal Tracker
Procreate
Skills:
Product THinking
Storyboarding
User REsearch
Interaction Design
MObile Design
UNFOLD IN THE PERSONALITY QUIZ MARKET
Many people have an idea about their preferences, traits, strengths, skills, etc. However many people often face difficulty verbalizing this self-knowledge and face stigmas & difficulties when looking for plausible and personalized guidance.
Purpose:
Unfold is creating a social twist to provide opportunities to facilitate the process of individuation. Critiquing the validity of current systems by taking a research-driven approach grounded on shared personal experiences.
Problem Discovery
I wanted to create something that pertained to myself in the way that emotionally and psychologically helpful and motivated by self-reflection, research, and a critique of current systems.
WHY PERSONALITY TEST?
As someone who’s been on a path of self discovery, I found the predictive power and interactive aspect to be comforting and applicable by scale.
#1: How might we create a product that is technically feasible and addresses a Valuable real world problem?
A personality test not only has functional aspect but also a social aspect. So what if we took advantage of the shareability of a quiz to make conquer the accessibility of mental health?
Project Goals
Give users an interactive and inclusive quiz experience
Effectively portray users with personalized and intelligent results
Offer suggestions, information, and space for change
Market Research
I looked into the general validity of personality tests. To my surprise there was a large amount of controversy surrounding personality tests, some even saying they were “completely meaningless” - Adam Grant(Vox)
The trustworthiness of quizzes themselves presents an initial hurdle. Furthermore, concerns regarding their validity, from factor analysis and correlation with real-world performance to alignment with type theory, raise serious doubts about their suitability as reliable measures.
To find more embedded issues with the current personality test market, I dove deeper into similar products and did a competitive analysis of popular personality tests using research methodologies like interviews and real world use.
Source: Vox and Sage Journals
Target Audience
Although personality tests don’t inherently have a primary persona, the most common groups tend to benefit and utilize most are:
Individuals seeking self-discovery and deeper self-awareness to empower significant life decisions.
Students and young adults looking to gain insight on ideal career paths aligned with their attributes and preferences.
Team members and leaders of organizations seeking to improve collaboration, communication and effectiveness by better appreciating individual differences.
Use case: Gain clarity on strengths, interests, and what would suit him to gain the confidence to get a more fulfilling job
Scenario: Michael takes a personality test that provides customizable insights into life, motivations, soft skills, etc. to get ideas for career paths that would fulfill and leverage his unique traits. This helps him get that job in his true passion which is UX design.
Use case: Understand Similarities with Friends and compare her results to her friends’ results to determine similarities and differences
Scenario: Sara asks 3 friends to each take an in-depth personality assessment. She can then easily compare the results to gain a precise understanding of their similarities and differences.
Use case: Gain reassurance to take this next step in her life and make an impactful career pivot to go to something more rewarding
Scenario: Sam takes this personality quiz to see her values. Seeing motivations laid out stigma-free gives her confidence to have candid conversations with mentors to strategize a career pivot.
MBTI, CliftonStrengths, Big 5 personalities, and Taiwan Design Expo personality test.
Competitive Analysis
These personality tests had clear priorities with some prioritizing functionality providing the user with clear results about the category they fit into like MBTI, CliftonStrengths, and Big 5 while others focused more on the interactivity.
Most notably, MBTI focused heavily on marketing and job fit, CliftonStrengths focused on attaching traits to users, Big 5 focused on the relationship between personality and academic behavior, and Taiwan Design Expo focused on building a sociable and trendy personality test.
Analysis of Secondary Research
Seeing the controversy around personality tests with their findings consistently criticized for inaccuracy and lack of research support I decided against prioritizing the succinctness of the test, given my lack of expertise in psychology and test design, creating a research-backed personality test was beyond this project’s 1-month scope.
I’ve personally seen that many traits are intertwined with others and strongly influenced by one’s perception. No one person is exactly one trait all the time. These traits instead can be scored on a spectrum and is better represented on a varying scale.
Additionally, it's frequently found that a person’s personality is generally static throughout their life, but if change were to be done, I noticed the most drastic forms of change are from larger and more significant events in a person’s life.
parents, partner, relationships ---> attachment, personal priorities
habits, skills, Passions ---> discipline, routine, motivation
#2: How might we create a personality test given the physical limitations and time constraints?
THought Process:
Instead of categorizing people, prioritize finding ways to expand the score and target how change is generally made.
Solution!
Provide Users With:
+ Reassurance (things they should to hear and positivity)
+ Guidance (life advice and prompt that spur self awareness and accountability)
+ Support (professional help and steps to take for support)
Ideation #1
My initial product idea was very ambitious considering the time constraints. I wanted to provide all these features for users so they could have everything they needed after taking the personality test. My mentor agreed that this was a bit extensive for a personality test, but justified that its better to have a lot of ideas than none at all.
Storyboarding + User Interviews
Hypothesis:
If users are presented with a personality test, then they are inclined to know more, specifically personalized feedback
Storyboard!
INterview Process
I ran 5 user interviews with people ranging from a wide demographic all within the 18-26 age range. All participants reported to have or were on some sort of self discovery journey.
Each session lasted around 20-30 minutes with some participants only giving feedback and others giving suggestions on the potential personality test.
I presented the storyboard to each participant. After, I asked a round of questions pertaining to user experience, benefits, and recommendations.
5 Key Interview & storyboard Takeaways
1
Results would make or break the product
2
Results must be warranted and tailored, constructive not overstepping
3
Expand beyond the basic quiz, answers shouldn’t be obvious
4
Participants wouldn’t act on changes, but will take them into account
5
The personality test user-flow was intuitive and fun
Interview Insights
The feedback received were mostly positive with some critiques & advice. All of the participants found the idea of personalized feedback for actionable change helpful but only some said they would actually act on the advice given. Going through the storyboard with participants highlighted some areas for attention in my initial conceptual model and areas that could potentially improve the test.
Iteration
While the initial scope of features proved ambitious within the timeframe, valuable feedback revealed the core importance of the results and quiz questions. This insight illuminated the potential for additional features after the personality test to detract from the test's true value.
Given the sensitive nature of serving unsolicited recommendations, I pivoted to ensure the advice and pathways provided were meaningful and impactful. Instead of attempting to categorize user personalities, the focus shifted to offering relevant guidance to help users address their pain points effectively.
Question 3-part design process
My initial research focused on identifying and understanding the various aspects and categories that make up human personality. I leveraged insights from existing personality tests while simultaneously crafting a novel set of comprehensive traits that capture the full spectrum of individual characteristics that contribute to a person’s unique character.
Conceptualizing Impactful Quiz Pages
The structure of the personality test was set by benchmarking against existing psychological theories of personality classification like the Big Five model. In addition to summative experiences to categorize personality construction. Once I felt that it compartmentalized the general person, I then moved on to pilot testing with other individuals and how they would generalize breakdown personalities. This is how I eventually narrowed the sections down to 5 and confirmed that the five factor model most effectively captured personality variations.
Introvert ———————— Extrovert
Forward an agenda ————————Empathetic to others
GEt work done ———————— Put others first
Assertive ———————— Reserved
Cooperativeness ———————— Competitiveness
Structure ————————Flexibility
Organization ————————Spontaneous
Thinking ———————— Feeling
Practicality———————— Creativity
Logical ———————— Emotional
Objective ———————— Subjective
Rational ———————— Intuitive
Optimism ———————— Skepticism
Closed-Mindedness ———————— Openness
Depth of Quiz Questions
Recognizing the limitations of formulaic personality quizzes, I adopted a data-driven approach. Informed by competitive analysis, I sought to create a more engaging user experience inspired by the Taiwan Design Expo's emphasis on user-centric design.
The resulting format employs a narrative arc with twelve crafted, open-ended questions designed to subtly assess personality traits. While this approach may yield results with slightly less precision, it prioritizes a more intellectually stimulating and enjoyable interaction for the user.
The result of simpler questions and short open ended answers limits the variation of interpretation that could affect or even bias user results. Each question and answer is clear and concise with clear differences and actions.
Assigning points
Another quiz making decision was the idea to randomize the direction of questions, instead of asking for varying trait spectrums, let the user decide the priority of their traits. This solution was done by first determining dimensional perspectives within the 5 trait categories, realizing that introvert-extrovert is a larger topic, but is also less nuanced, resulting in lesser total points compared to something like assertiveness and passivity.
Realizing the multifaceted nature of personalities, I opted for a granular approach that serves to avoid the binary trait spectrums and resorted to a point scaling system to capture a broader range of personality aspects. Depending on the obviousness of quiz answers and the weight of questions, answers were rated on a 2 - 4 scale to better replicate a more drastic decision in a person’s life.
Introvert: 10pts (1a,3c,12a)
Extrovert: 12pts (1b,4c,8c,12b)
Assertiveness: 18pts (2a,3d,6a,8b,12c)
Passivity: 21pts (1d,2d,5d,6c,8a,9d,11d,12d)
Structure: 20pts (4a,5c,7c,9a,10c,11a)
Flexibility: 15pts (2b,4b,7b,9b,11b)
Rationality: 14pts (2c,4d,6b,9c)
Intuitiveness: 14pts (3a,5b,8d,10d)
Optimism: 9pts (6d,7d,10a)
Skepticism: 15pts (3b,5a,7a,10b,11c)
HI-fi Prototype
Unfold has been a rewarded yet fire fueled passion project. With more time and feedback this project can only go further. When first brainstorming about the product I was going to create, I could never have imagined how much goes into a personality test. The questions themselves took a few weeks to find come up with and iterate through. I'd hoped to create a ratified personality test with a working point system in Figma, but there are logic constraints for a point tracking system.