[IxDA Discuss] What's your Personality Type? (Related to: NowHiring Leonardo DaVinci?)

[Christopher Fahey]

I'm not surprised by all the N's, but wow, look at all the J's! 

In an earlier discussion, I speculated that "empathy", despite our claims,
might not actually be a personality trait that is very common among IAs. A J
indicates decisiveness and strong planning skills, but are these traits
really consistent with someone who is supposed to care more about what other
people think? Can a J really accept a usability test's conclusion that their
design is 100% wrong, or are they more likely to be resistent to the change
of plan?

I also am surprised by the number of I's. Again, is an introverted person
ideally suited to empathy-based thinking? Or are they more likely to seek
working styles where they are able to focus on a solution by themselves.

I'm not saying that being an I or a J makes a person a bad information
architect. I'm just saying that a lot of IAs approach their job from a
perspective where putting themselves in another person's shoes and listening
to other people's opinions isn't as influential as we might think it would
be. Sometimes an IA's value is in their ability to hunker down by
themselves, consider all of the possibilities where a design can go right
and wrong, think of all the potential uses of an interface, map them all
out, and to think of new ideas in that context. A lot of IA work can be done
intuitively, which would explain why there are so many N's in this report.

Me?

I'm ENFP. (23,70,64,70)
I'm an entrepreneur, interaction design consultant, and a manager. 

The test confirms what I already know: that I work best when I am paired up
with a J! 

I also found about half of the questions to be ambigious and incredibly hard
to answer, and I suppose that a lot of my answers indicated the exact wrong
thing about me as a result. For example, the "Do you admire people who"
question: I answered "can get things done" because I wish I was better at
getting things done, but apparently that answer makes me less Feeling and
more Thinking. Apparently if I admire people who "are warm and kind" I'd be
more Feeling. These tests always kind of make me a little mad, knowing that
people are actually using them to make important decisions about people's
lives when in fact they seem so arbitrary. What does that say about me?

-Cf

Christopher Fahey
____________________________
Behavior
http://www.behaviordesign.com
me: http://www.graphpaper.com