Beyond the Buzzfeed Quiz: Designing an Immersive Sonic Personality Experience
How we integrated sound and visuals together to create a unique and engaging self-discovery journey
Imagine taking a personality quiz that not only dives into the intricacies of who you are but also immerses you in a multi-sensory experience.
That was our goal when we designed Sonicality.
Sonicality — which are 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. With a quick 10-question quiz, Sonicality analyses how sounds shape your emotions and personality. At the end, you discover your unique sonic personality, complete with a personalised soundtrack and visual.
This quiz is our collaboration with Feelers, an artist collective producing art works and experiences through cross-disciplinary experimentation. It’s based on the premise that there are aspects of you that sets you apart from others — including a signature sound.
We’ll elaborate our journey of creating Sonicality in this article that goes beyond questions alone by integrating the art of sound and visuals to bring it to life.
Weaving together sound and visuals ♾️
In today’s digital landscape, a swift Google search for personality quizzes yields a wide array of results, which got us to ask ourselves:
What will pique curiosity for people to complete our quiz, and share it with others?
How can Sonicality stand out amongst our competitors?
The idea of weaving sound and visuals into a personality quiz is already a unique approach that we felt would definitely engage the audience. But we wanted to take it to the next level — how can we leave a lasting impression?
We aimed to convey the qualities of sound into visuals. At the same time, we were clear that we did not want the visuals to distract users from completing the quiz, as this was ultimately our goal! As a result, we opted to craft a central visual element using animated abstract shapes and colours that could be consistently utilised across the entire microsite.
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. To spice it up, various animation styles were used on different pages to distinguish and introduce subtle yet impactful changes.
Regarding content, we ensured that questions were clear to understand and easy to answer, and incorporated opportunities for users to engage by listening to various sounds before responding. The goal here was to encourage users to embrace sound as part of our daily lives, heighten their awareness of sounds, and appreciate the role of sonic branding in a lighthearted and engaging way.
Making magic through collaboration 🤝🏻
Just as Coldplay sang it, ‘Call it magic, call it true…’ We like to think that collaboration really works wonders, especially in the case of Sonicality.
During the initial planning stage, we teamed up with Feelers to curate eight sonic personalities for the quiz. Our goal was to feature eight distinct characters that showcase a variety of sonic qualities and represent different genres in sound and music. With these traits, we incorporated their perceived strengths and weaknesses to add a human touch to these personalities. We then linked each option in the questionnaire to the character(s) that best matched.
Next, to elevate Sonicality into a fully immersive sound experience, we worked with Artwave to produce eight soundtracks for the personalities. Despite having only written descriptions, they conceptualised and created a 15 to 20-second clip for each personality within a few weeks 🤩
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).
Furthermore, to encourage greater interaction and set Sonicality apart from other personality quizzes, we curated Spotify playlists for each personality! The song selections were contributed by our team at 55 Minutes, Artwave, Feelers, and others.
Last but not least, to bring these distinctive personalities to life, we worked with seven illustrators. Why not just work with one illustrator? We wanted to tap on the unique interpretative style of each individual illustrator; they were given details about each personality, including a short description, sonic traits, strengths, weaknesses and an associated soundtrack. Alongside this, we provided a mood board showcasing preferred illustration styles. Most importantly, each personality was assigned a primary colour theme to be incorporated into the artwork. The illustrators also had the opportunity to contribute to the Spotify playlist dedicated to their respective illustrated personality!
It was a slightly nerve-wracking yet exciting opportunity for me to collaborate with the illustrators. We lacked prior working relationships, yet all of them generously agreed to be part of Sonicality. Each illustrator also had their unique illustration style and approach — which don’t get me wrong, it isn’t wrong — making it crucial to navigate this collaboration with sensitivity and respect. These led to a sense of responsibility and an underlying pressure on myself to manage these relationships well, despite not knowing how the outcomes would turn out. Nonetheless, I was excited to see what the illustrators would bring to the table to elevate Sonicality. Looking at how the final visualisations turned out, I felt incredibly grateful for these collaborations. They were creative and well-thought through; they complement the soundscapes, resulting in an even more cohesive and immersive experience.
Truthfully, anything could’ve happened during these collaborations and any of them could have turned disastrous, but like I mentioned before, ‘call it magic, call it true…’, the collaborations with various parties exceeded my initial expectations and concerns 🥹 Teamwork truly makes the dream work!
Social engagement considerations 🤳🏻
The outcome of these collaborations wouldn’t have been fruitful and meaningful without showcasing them on social media. In addition, our goals then 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.
Conclusion
Developing Sonicality and witnessing people completing the quiz and sharing it was like living a dream. Despite having multiple collaborations, it was significantly one of the smoothest, most engaging, and unforgettable projects to date.
The journey of producing Sonicality has also made me recognise the potential of multisensory (combining visual and auditory elements) experiences — how it can be highly impactful in enhancing user engagement and overall product experiences. When done right, it can captivate users and evoke stronger emotional responses and connections, making the user experience overall more engaging and memorable.
User experience aside, it can also set your brand/business/product apart from competitors. By carefully selecting or composing audio sounds that align with the brand’s personality and values, it can create a cohesive and holistic brand experience that shows consistency, reinforcing brand identity and enhancing brand recall in the long term. When users constantly encounter the brand’s sonic elements across different contexts, it reinforces the brand in their memory, contributing to long term recall.
All in all, integrating multisensory experiences can shape user engagement and experiences that go beyond the capabilities of visuals alone. It creates a more memorable and distinct experience that would ultimately differentiate the brand/business/product apart with users in mind.
Elaine does UI/UX design at 55 Minutes. Inspired by architecture, art, fashion, nature, photography, and people, Elaine’s approach to design is to tap into what makes us human — our emotions. She believes good design involves understanding who she’s designing for, and how design makes them feel. For her to be pixel-perfect in her work, she needs a good breakfast. Coffee is a must too.
