Cool Hunting

Though personality tests generally remind us of the creepy eHarmony guy, are never really as accurate as they claim to be and results usually lack any creative presentation, when we saw the new site from Signal Patterns we were impressed. It's surprisingly accurate, fun to use and looks good too.

The year-old company is made up of hardcore science wizards, and Signal Patterns built these surveys on literally decades of scientific research and study. They've currently got a personality survey and a music survey, but are planning more in the near future.

We took the personality survey to see what all the hype was about and were pleasantly surprised. While we admit that the number of questions seemed a little daunting (90?!), clicking through them was simple, quick, and the questions were thought-provoking.

What really makes these surveys stand out are the results. While most survey sites give you a numeric score or a simple (and often confusing) color pattern with some descriptive text, Signal Patterns' results are completely interactive and so creative and innovative that the company is patenting them. The Flash-based personality pattern lets you dig around and explore your results in depth, breaking down each of your strongest personality factors into specific traits. For instance, if you score strongly "Agreeable," you can dig deeper to learn more about traits such as "Warmth," "Empathetic," and "Cooperative" to learn why you scored the way you did. You can also use the same results to examine your opposite traits to learn more about yourself through contrast. You can view results by all traits, your top 10 traits or by factors.

They take it a step further too, making your results usable as criteria for comparing yourself to others—you can quickly explore people who have gotten similar scores, opposite scores, or compare yourself to specific individuals by overlaying sets of results. By tweaking the results overlay, you can really explore your differences and similarities. And of course, you can take your results with you onto MySpace, Facebook, your blog, etc. with the results widget, and a mobile version to be released soon. Currently in private beta, you can go to SignalPatterns.com to learn more. CH readers can click here to sign up.

Thanks to our friends at Bond Art + Science for sending this our way!