Sonicality: A Sonic Personality Quiz
(Product Design, Branding, Graphic Design)
Just as there are visual representations of you, there are also audio features of your personality. Sonicality — using the words ‘sonic’ and ‘personality’ combined — is a sound-focused microsite that facilitates your interaction with notes, tones and ambient sounds to increase your awareness and appreciation of everything audio. It is based on the premise that there are aspects of you that set you apart from others — including a signature sound.
Compromising of 10 multiple-choice questions and adopting a mobile-only user experience, the quiz takes into consideration the relationships between sound, emotions, and personality. It is a fun way to increase awareness and appreciation of the role of audio in our lives, and discover the sounds that make us, us — using sound as a tool to shape and enhance our individual identity.
It is a way to introduce sonic branding to the public — to help users be aware and experience how sound plays a role in our daily lives, acknowledge it as a critical aspect in user experience, and to learn and delve deeper into the space of sound as part of user experience.
This quiz is our collaboration with Feelers, an artist collective producing art works and experiences through cross-disciplinary experimentation.
Approach
The animated colours communicate the qualities of sound; it translates auditory components into a fluid visual form. The dynamic visual element captures interest and conveys a trendy, progressive and fresh vibe to the quiz. To ensure that the visual remains engaging yet readable and unobtrusive, we added a layer of translucency to the visual, resulting in milder colour combinations that look visually less intense. This kept the key visual element simple, clean, yet engaging.
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the audio experience
To elevate Sonicality into a fully immersive sound experience, we worked with Artwave to produce eight soundtracks for the personalities. We took the chance to publish the clips into an album on Spotify as a way to create a cohesive user experience throughout the entire journey — from completing the quiz, to discovering their sonic personality, then allowing them to revisit the soundtrack. This gives users a chance to listen to the soundtrack again (and on loop if they’d like), while providing an opportunity for them to explore other soundtracks (of other personalities). To encourage greater interaction and set Sonicality apart from other personality quizzes, we curated Spotify playlists for each personality.
Listen to each individual personality’s soundtrack here, and listen to the curated personalities’ playlists here.
Visuals (illustrations)
Last but not least, we worked with seven illustrators to bring these distinctive personalities to life, as we wanted to tap on the unique interpretative style of each individual illustrator.
Social engagement considerations
Our goals were to interact with those who have completed Sonicality and in turn, encourage a larger audience to complete the quiz and have more individuals sharing their personality results on social platforms.
Thus, in terms of social engagement, we leveraged on two aspects of interpersonal interaction to drive engagement:
The innate desire of people to find out more about themselves
The need to show others who they are and their uniqueness (or similarities) to others
In response, we created four sets of social media materials used over a three-week period as part of the launch initiative:
First set: Introduce Sonicality and entice people to complete the quiz
Second set: Introduce the eight different sound personality types
Third set: Introduce the illustrators behind each personality type
Fourth set: Invite people to listen to the Spotify playlist of their personality type and contribute a song to it
These initiatives on social media — predominantly on Instagram as the platform lends itself nicely to both visual and audio — achieved a high engagement rate of 70%. The top seven countries from where participants were based are Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, USA, Australia and India.