Signal Patterns Personality iPhone App

SignalPatterns helps people learn more about themselves. The science behind their psychology research-based surveys relies on the Big Five personality dimensions consisting of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and intellect.

The SignalPattern team does not believe in "types" of personality as in the famous Myer-Briggs test that looks at only 16 personality types. Instead, it looks at the dimensions of personality. People can score high or low on each of the five dimensions. So looking at the different possible combinations, this leads to 45 traits.

In English, MySpace has about 200 million active users. If you distribute people evenly into the 16 personality types, and you share the same personality type with 13 million other users. Looking at 45 traits provides more detail and finding subtle differences among people.

The Personality Test asks questions like the one shown in the next image that take about 10 minutes to answer. You need to decide how much the statement is or isn't like you. Ovals appear at the bottom with the left being "Opposite of me" and the right being "Exactly like me." Read the statement and decide if it's just like you or not quite like you and select the oval that best fits. Obviously, the middle oval is half and half.

The iPhone / iPod Touch personality test resembles the online version minus one feature (see next screen shot of the missing feature). It doesn't show your top 10 traits in a chart. All you see is a list of your traits from highest to lowest. It feels incomplete without the chart or a way to share the information online. However, it does a good job reflecting the higher traits of the person taking the test.

You also can't forward the test information from the iPod or iPhone. It only retains one person's results the last one taking the test. You could have your friends take it, but your results are gone and you have no data for comparison.

The following images show shows the test results and a close up of one of the traits. That's all it tells you.

The other part of the iPod Touch / iPhone application is the science portion. It's the same information you can get on the web site including the scientific team's bio, videos explaining the science and Big Five, list of books on the topic, articles on personality theory, and links to web sites for more details. The app also links to more surveys you can take online, but they're not optimized for the small screen with all the scrolling you need to do to be able to read everything.

Overall, it's a nice little app that could stand a little more of the charting and less of the science. People will be more interested in charting and sharing than in science while on their iPod Touch and iPhone. The app costs $1.99 and is available in iTunes Store.

Images: All images are screenshots of Signal Patterns Personality Test by Signal Patterns.