In this final ideas post, Amir describes an interest-based online test – one which can analyse a user’s personalities based on their social/interest networks for a number of uses. In the next post, we will present our chosen idea, why we chose it, and what we will be doing next in this project.
The current situation
- Time is valuable
- Year after year more people are spending more time on social networking websites.
- Some people spend their time to fulfil questionnaires to see what type of person they are; both in real life and on social networking websites.
- Not all of these questionnaires on social networking sites are based on academic theories; lots of them are just for fun.
- Particularly in Facebook, many of these applications have a range of 20 to 900 monthly active users.
- Self-knowledge is necessary
- There are three primary motives that lead us in the search for self-knowledge: Self-Enhancement, Accuracy and Consistency.
- Self-knowledge is based on several different forms of information.
- There is a connection between what we like and our personality.
- Our favourite types of music, movie, books and such can represent our character.
The solution
- In Facebook, as the most popular social networking website, people have a profile in which they can list their favourite music, books, movies, TV shows, Games.
- There are also a variety of existing databases, which contain a significant amount of information about each of the mentioned media that a person likes. For instance, IMDB has an accurate database of movies; Amazon and Google Books have a database of books; iTunes can be a reference to identify the kind of music.
- With the available information, a tool can be designed to give the person his/her personality analysis without asking questions.
- Based on available data from the users we can offer them further products, which have a similar pattern.
- Furthermore, we can help connect users with other people with complementary personalities.
The values to the users
- People spend their time to get useful information that is based on scientific theories.
- They can get recommendations that suit their taste.
- They can find new people with the same interest or people that match their personality to become friends with.
As it is just a rough idea, it can be extended to offer more values for different stockholders.
Similar previous work
Getglue has some cool related features to look at.
Challenges and issues
- The accuracy of the results of personality test could be controversial.
- There is an overlap with Psychology which none of the group members has academic experience in it; therefore, more research would be needed.