I just created a personalDNA map for myself. Turns out I am a Benevolent Inventor… beats being a benevolent dictator I say! However, this posting is concerned not with what the survey found out about me but rather about what I learned about the survey.

Let’s get the the personal profile stuff out of the way. Here’s a cool looking map that the personaldna people created for me, not that it makes much sense. You can find out details of what the survey came up with by clicking on the link below the image. Take all that you read there with a pinch of salt!

Benevolent Inventor

What was interesting for me was the were the different kinds of question formats that were used. The questions went beyond the simple 1-5 Likert scales or true false options we so often see.

For instance here is a true false option, pretty standard as you can see.

… and then there were the sliders, a variation on the 5 or 7 point likert scale.

… followed by grids such as this one, where you dragged the “Green Dot” to the position that seems right to you.

Finally, the most interesting of all were the Buckets. Here you drag the two sliders to where-ever you feel most comfortable, as long as you empty the entire bucket. Of course you could have more than one slider, as in the second example below

Pretty cool examples of new survey techniques, don’t you think.