Your go-to personality quiz maker and how to use it

Resources Your go-to personality quiz maker and how to use it

If you’ve identified that you need a personality test to achieve a specified business goal, and you know you need to go down the bespoke route but you’re not sure how to get started, this article’s for you.

We’re going to run you through how online personality test makers work, and the steps and methodology for putting yours together.

We’re using our own personality test template on the Drimify platform as an example – we built it and developed it while working with clients across industries around the world, and we really do believe it’s a top-tier, enterprise-grade option – but this advice is broad enough that it can be applied to whatever quiz making software you use.

Why use a personality quiz maker?

Personality tests or personality assessment questionnaires have been in use as we would recognise them since World War I. “Shell shock” (later termed “combat stress reaction” but what we’d know today as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD) sent 15 per cent of British soldiers home.

To try and combat this, the “Psychoneurotic Inventory” was created in an attempt to assess recruits’ susceptibility. Questions like: “Have you ever been afraid of going insane?” made the final cut, and while it sounds comically on the nose to a modern audience, everything has to start somewhere.

The approach was fine-tuned over the years, and applied to HR and publishing (think Cosmo quizzes), and with the advent of higher-speed internet, personality tests came online, delivering instant feedback to users taking the tests with no adjudicators necessary, and suddenly you had a tool that could engage audiences for any number of business functions.

However, creating personality tests had an initial barrier to entry until gamification platforms started offering pre-made game templates. Now, no expensive development costs or inhouse expertise are required. Personality tests can be made quickly and to a high standard by small to medium-sized enterprises and marketing departments within a morning.

A personality quiz maker means that between a copywriter and a graphic designer, you can put together a pro-level personality test in a matter of hours.

What you want to look for an “enterprise-grade” personality quiz maker

There are a lot of personality quiz makers available, but they are not all equal.

For businesses looking for truly effective tools that will help them achieve their goals, you need something that’s “enterprise-grade.” Many providers will throw that term around, but here are the factors a personality test platform should be able to provide to live up to it:

How to create a personality quiz: Step-by-step

So let’s get into the nuts and bolts of building your personality quiz.

The general approach is the same, whether you’re building a fun Buzzfeed-style personality quiz to entertain, a personality test to market a new product or intellectual property, or you’re looking for a way to engage and assess workers or candidates (or users) for HR purposes.

Define your profiles or personality types

This is always step one.

This is what it’s all about afterall – assigning results to participants or respondents based on their answers to categorise them. On a more granular level, you also need something to attach your multiple choice answers to to make the game mechanic work.

The profiles or personality types that will ultimately get assigned to users should have a catchy and distinct title, but elaborate on what the personality type means in the description to add value and justify completing the quiz.

With the personality types, you’re essentially giving every user or participant a different possible end screen based on their answers, so you can have different call to action buttons (CTAs) at the end.

Whether your personality test is for marketing, recruitment, HR, or publishing in the style of Buzzfeed and other online titles, you should utilise these buttons to link to something strategic for your project.

For examples:

Create your personality test’s questions and answers

This is really where you make or break your personality test. The questions and the answers need to be distinct, but somewhat equal in the sense that there’s not an obviously desirable answer and another answer that’s objectively diabolical behaviour.

For example, let’s say you make a sorting hat personality test for Harry Potter fans. If the question is, “Your friends would most likely describe you as…” and your answers are:

That’s going to just be too obvious. Now while this is a publishing/ entertainment example, the point stands up especially for recruitment and HR. Obviously desirable or undesirable answers makes your personality test easy to cheat, so unless the aim is self-reflection,

Pro tip: Really factor your audience into how many questions you create. If it’s a fun Buzzfeed-style personality test for your publication or content marketing that’s tapping into your participant’s niche interests, you could get away with up to 10 questions.

If it’s from a recruitment perspective pre-interview, keep it short, if it’s post interview and you have genuine interest in the candidate, you could go bigger to get a more robust data set on your candidate.

Flesh out your gamified personality test’s branding and configurations

You also need to consider the desired user journey and the appearance of your personality test.

With Drimify, you have a lot of levers when it comes to defining these aspects, but you should try and match the visuals to the subject matter.

For example:

The other thing to consider is your intermediate data collection form. If it’s just a bit of fun for your publication’s website to keep people engaged, this may not be necessary, but most of the time, these are a great opportunity to try and people to opt-in to your email marketing newsletter.

The general rule of thumb with data collection forms is to keep them short to make them a small blocker to participation or completion of the personality quiz, but with a question and answer format, where they’re going to be asked a load of questions anyway, this rule of thumb becomes almost scientific.

Consider the possibilities: You can also include intermediate content screens before or after your experience, and even between questions, so depending on exactly what the purpose of your personality test is, you have multiple opportunities to get across desired messaging pertinent to your project. Obviously, these need to be essential, as too much intermediate content can harm completion rates.

Use in-house expertise to create an impactful personality test

The Briggs-Myers Type indicator personality test was created by two unqualified people with zero psychological training, and it’s the most taken and utilised personality test in the world by businesses.

Regardless of the criticisms people have levelled against it, it makes you think: if two people without any relevant experience can create a personality test that becomes so universally used and trusted, imagine how targeted and useful to your business you can make your own personality test using your own in-house expertise.

Consider this exaggerated example: a royal correspondent and a war journalist are both technically reporters, but the demands and skills each must have are entirely different. You couldn’t just swap the two around and expect great results.

The fact of the matter is – today more than ever – the demands of every workplace are idiosyncratic to the culture and the industry, and nobody knows better the sorts of personality traits required to succeed at a particular company and a particular role.

If you’re creating psychometric tests, build your personality profiles based on your top performers across positions. You may well have the blueprint in your workforce, and it will likely not conform precisely with the generic, well-known personality tests.

Similarly, for marketing and external communications, you know that you have to build your own game. The odds are, depending on your industry, that you have people in your organisation that would be customers even if they didn’t work for you. You can work with these people to build personality tests that will resonate with your audience.

This is basic business. Use ALL of your human resources. You’re not putting out press releases and social media posts that haven’t gone through your copywriting team, so why would you give your personality test any less collective effort?

Test your personality test to find ways to improve it

The final thing to do is to test your personality test.

Test it and test it and test it some more. Get everyone in your organisation to test it and see what the results look like to check you don’t need to tweak it. Whether it’s a fun personality quiz for a Christmas campaign, or to support the most serious recruitment drive in company history, you’ve gotta test.

Consider the design, the user experience (UX), and also the validity of the results. To take an earlier example, if everyone who tests comes up as being in Gryffindor, the very questions and answers and the profiles will need adjusting. (Everyone’s got a couple of Hufflepuffs and at least one Slytherin, and you know who they are.)

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