How are personality test results calculated?

Let’s dive in and show how you can calculate personality test results with Riddle’s online quiz maker.

Online personality quizzes are powerful tools for diagnostic or assessment style quizzes. The idea is there aren’t any right or wrong answers. (Read our in-depth guide for creating the perfect personality test.)

Instead, you create overall personality test results, then show each user the one that is the closest match for their responses.

Most quiz maker tools (like TryInteract) use a very simple mapping system. If you chose answer A for question 1, you would get matched to personality result A, and choosing B will get mapped to personality result B.

The problem is that this assumes that every answer you map will apply equally to each personality test result.

We prefer to give you more flexibility with Riddle’s weighted scoring system.

After all, some answers might mean different things to different personality results.

Video: Setting up personality test results with Riddle

We whipped up this handy help video for you.

Watch our co-founder Mike as he walks you how the weighting works with our personality test results:

Example use case

Let’s imagine you’ve created a ‘What type of electric car should you buy?’ personality test – and you ask, “What’s the most important factor for you?”

The choices are:

1. Range
2. Cost
3. Looks

And the possible results are:

• Fiat 500e
• Tesla Model 3
• Hyundai Ioniq 5

Each type of car has different strengths. If users select ‘range’, you might want to give the most emphasis for Tesla. However, the Ioniq is pretty good too – ideally, you could give it at least some points.

Using TryInteract’s basic results system – Tesla would get the same score as the Ioniq. With Riddle’s personality test maker, however, you could give Tesla 2-3X as many points as the Ioniq – which means a greater likelihood that users will get more accurate results.

Riddle’s weighted personality test results

At Riddle, you can.

Life isn’t always black and white. We’ve built a weighted response system to accommodate life’s many shades of grey.

You have a range of 21 options for each choice – so you have maximum flexibility with your personality test results:

• 0: No association
• 1-7: Weak association
• 8-14: Medium association
• 15-20: Strong association

As you move the slider for each response, each ‘tick’ increases the points assigned for that response.

A tick on #12 (medium) is worth less than a tick on #13 (medium), for example.

At the end of your personality quiz, our system counts up the points for each result type – then assigns the user the particular result with the most points.

In our electric car example, you could set up the scoring like this:

Additional personality test resources

Want to learn more about crafting a compelling personality quiz?

Check out our blog post ‘Creating the perfect online personality test’ – full of our team’s tips and best practices from years of quiz making

Make a personality test with Riddle’s online quiz maker

Video transcript

(As an accessible online quiz creator, we like to also make sure our blog and help docs are easy to use with screen readers and other tools. So we add transcripts of any videos we embed – for people who like to use screen readers and similar software.)

Hello, my name’s Mike and I’m one of the co-founders here at Riddle. And in this short video, I’m going to talk about and show you how you can use our personality test and our weighted personality test results feature to give really subtle and sophisticated personality test results.

First, I’m going to pop over here and launch our personality test. One note, if you’re looking for more of a logic branching tree option, such as “If this person answers this and this and this answer, give them this result” – try our branching logic journey quiz format.

Journey doesn’t have weighting, but it has a nice decision logic tree, which is really cool for very concrete logic flows.

OK, but in our personality test, I’m just going to click on our Adventure Foodie template – and I’m going to copy that to our account. And what you’ll see here I’ve created four personality test results.

The reason we’ve added a subtle weighting system to our personality test maker is that often, a single answer can apply in different ways to different results.

So a lot of online quiz maker software products, they’ll just say, “If you answered A, you’re going to map it to result A and you can maybe map it to result B as well. But the effect of the choices is the same.”

We’ve done something different.

So basically, the example question is “Munching on Marmite, marvelous!” (Agree or disagree)

Now for those of you who are not Brits, Marmite is this ‘love it or hate it’ yeast extract spread.

Personally, I think it’s kind of disgusting, but a lot of Brits will absolutely love it.

OK, so I strongly disagree. I’m going to say this is a strong association to this personality test result – that’s 20 points, because someone who’s strongly disagrees with munching on Marmite, that’s probably someone who’s not willing to branch out to new types of food.

However, it might also apply a bit to someone who’s a Cautious Chewer. So I said, you know what, I can give them 10 points.

But for a “Fabulous Foodie” personality test result, these people are up for trying anything, there’s no association. This choice means nothing to this result type.

So what you can do is with each answer is set different weighting on a person answer basis to multiple personality test results.

OK, I’m going to scroll down to ‘Neither agree or disagree’. Yeah, this suits the “Cautious Chewer” and possibly also “Adventurous appetite”, but “Fabulous Foodie” and “Scaredy Cat” – this doesn’t apply. So this just gives you some flexibility and customization at every answer to assign points.

Now, when people get to the end of the personality test, we just go on straight points.

So in this case, someone who answers strongly disagree – that’s 20 points for Scaredy Cat and 10 points for Cautious Chewer. If I go to question two, which is anchovies on pizza, you’ll see here we just keep mapping and at the very end we just say whatever result gets the most points, that’s their overall result.

If you’re using our extended results feature, which in this case is this guy right here, you can show how they’ve done on all the other ones as well.

So this is another way to show all the weightings I’ve used. I’ve just answered four questions on this demo test and let’s see how this looks.

It looks like 47 percent of all the points went to Scaredy Cat. Forty five percent went to Cautious Chewer and eight percent went to Adventurous Appetite.

There you go. There’s how our personality test and our weighting system work with Riddle. If you have any questions on setting up your personality test, just give us a shout on our support chat.

We actually don’t have an outsourced support unit. Myself, my co-founder Boris, all of our developers, everyone on our team, we all race each other to be first to respond to customer questions.

A – we love helping. And B? We have a monthly beer competition. So the person who answers the most tickets gets beer and that always motivates everybody. All right, thanks so much and Happy Riddling.