SINGAPORE — By now, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn't done the Taiwan Design Expo personality quiz.

With charming illustrations and a mystical "choose your own adventure" story, the quiz professes to help you discover "your innate personality traits".

In just a little over a week, the quiz seems to have taken social media platforms by storm, inspiring numerous tweets from Asia and even the United States and Spain.

In Singapore, the quiz appeared to explode in popularity on Instagram Stories and messaging apps over the course of the past week, with people sharing their results and calling on others to take it.

To date, it appears that the quiz has been taken over two million times.

Launched to promote the design exhibition running from Friday (Oct 6) to October 22 in New Taipei City, the quiz assigns you one of 16 personalities strangely reminiscent of Pokemon types: Electric, Fairy, Feline, Fire, Flying, Ghost, Grass, Ground, Ice, Light, Poison, Steel, Super Power, Rock, Water or Wind.

Your result also tells you which personality types are most and least compatible with yours, a feature which has prompted many users to share the quiz with their family and friends in hopes of finding out whether or not their types are seen as compatible.

In addition to people sharing and discussing their results, the quiz has also spawned related trends on X (formerly Twitter), in which users share an original character created using online image maker Picrew or a photo of their fandom "bias" alongside their "innate personality" quiz results.

The term "bias" stems from K-pop fandom, in which it refers to a fan's favourite member from a particular group.

But what makes this particular quiz different from any other personality test?

According to netizens, one reason is — as you would expect from a quiz by the Taiwan Design Expo — the design, which Reddit and X users have called "cute", "very appealing" and "really good graphic design".

Unlike typical Buzzfeed-esque "What Disney princess are you?" quizzes which often use generic stock photos, the 12 questions are paired with pleasing animations related to each scenario, sometimes even differing depending on which choice you pick.

The quiz also presents your results in a handy graphic at the end, which includes a little avatar of your personality type.

A common sentiment on social media was: "I really love the design of this quiz."

Aesthetic aside, users also appeared to enjoy the structure of the quiz. As one Reddit user commented: "This was beyond fun, the fantasy story element really made the test stand out."

Another said: "This is what personality tests should be, getting you into a situation and actually answering the way you would act."

X users shared that the test's whimsical journey made it "super peaceful to take" and "quite fresh compared to other tests". It also helped that there were not many questions to answer, they said.

"I liked the short form, because of the macroscopic focus," agreed a Reddit user. "I just enjoyed the change of pace or perspective. A breath of fresh air, and simple enough to feel like I could similarly play around with it."

Of course, the apparent accuracy of the test was also another factor that amazed netizens, as a majority seemed to find it startlingly on point.

On a tweet which garnered 1,000 retweets and 2,500 comments, one X user joked: "Why was this such a read?"

"I think the results are pretty accurate given how short and seemingly unrelated the questions were," said one Reddit user.

The quiz has also been a hot topic on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) subreddit of late. The MBTI, arguably the most popular online personality test globally, also assigns each user one of 16 personality types.

Every person is said to have one preferred quality from each of the four MBTI categories, namely: Introversion or Extraversion, Sensing or Intuition, Thinking or Feeling and Judging or Perceiving.

With the emergence of this new personality test, MBTI enthusiasts have been curious about how it relates to their MBTI assessments, taking to Reddit to share their results for both tests. Some have even tried to create a one-to-one mapping of results, though without much success.

However, some critics have called the quiz "superficial", "malleable" and "largely incoherent".

"A couple of the questions were interesting (like the one about the choice to turn into other people and experience their lives 'from the inside', or take up an omniscient but detached point of view on people's actions)," remarked one user on the INFJ subreddit.

"But some made little sense, or at least weren't well thought out (like the one with the kittens)."

The third question in the quiz reads: "You need to pass through a cave to reach the village. Right before you step in the cave, a litter of kittens bolted out..."

In the first option, the traveller is thankful that it was not something more dangerous, while in the second, they wonder where the kittens went.

"I'm thankful kittens aren't dangerous and if they disappeared I'd wonder where they went? So both?" another Redditor responded.

Still, others have pointed out that it is simply intended as a fun, lighthearted activity and should not be taken too seriously.

"I really enjoyed the quiz, (it's) nice that they extrapolated some of my character traits from my unrelated answers," concluded one X user. "The innate personality isn't quite accurate but I suppose there's only so much a 12-question personality quiz will do."