VisualDNA 'Who Am I?' Test Alternatives

VisualDNA built its reputation on picture quizzes. Its own quiz pages, as preserved by the Internet Archive from 2013 and 2014, describe every VisualDNA quiz as very visual by design, and list a small family of them: a general Personality Quiz, a new-year goal-setting quiz, and Who Am I?, which the company called the most advanced personality test it offered.

Who Am I? drew on the five-factor model of personality, better known as the Big Five or OCEAN. The same pages say it would show how open you are to new experiences and where you land on conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, then connect that combination to everyday behavior, from the films you like to how you hold up under stress. Each quiz ended with a detailed report personalized to your answers.

The quiz was also the front door to a business. By 2015 the VisualDNA homepage described the company as combining big data and psychology to build profiling products for digital advertising and credit scoring. The advertising half of that business is still part of how the quiz works today (more on that below).

Yes, with some caveats about where to find it. Here is what we found when we checked in October 2026.

• •visualdna.com and www.visualdna.com no longer point to a website, so typing the old address gets you nothing. Archived snapshots show the domain redirecting to a Nielsen panels page in 2022 and 2023.
• •Older quiz links on you.visualdna.com no longer load either.
• •The quiz itself lives on at quiz.visualdna.com, branded The VisualDNA Who Am I? Quiz. Nielsen's panels page lists versions for the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Australia, Hong Kong, Italy, and Spain. The US, UK, Canadian, French, and German links loaded for us. The others still pointed at the old you.visualdna.com address.

The current US version keeps the format people remember. After a consent screen, the first question asks which of a set of photos amazes you most, and the personality section runs to 32 questions, every one answered by picking a picture. The quiz also asks a few demographic questions and offers an opt-in section of lifestyle and brand questions, which it says helps keep the quiz free. Nielsen describes the quiz as designed by psychologists and based on the OCEAN (Big Five) model, so the results cover the same five traits as before.

The part worth reading before you start is the data use. Nielsen's VisualDNA privacy notice says your answers are used to give you a tailored result, and also to build profiles and audience segments that its clients use for interest-based advertising. None of this is hidden; it is on the consent screen and in the notice. If you are comfortable with that trade, nothing else on this page will feel as much like the quiz you remember.

If you are trying to make sense of an old result, or to compare it with a new test, it helps to know what the five traits actually describe. Every Big Five test, picture-based or not, is aiming at the same five continuums.

• •Openness: appetite for new ideas, art, and experience. High scorers get restless with routine; low scorers prefer the familiar and the proven.
• •Conscientiousness: organization, follow-through, and self-discipline. This is the trait behind the tidy desk and the early arrival, two things the current Who Am I? quiz asks about with pictures.
• •Extraversion: how much energy you get from people and stimulation. Introversion is not the same as shyness; it is closer to a preference for quieter settings.
• •Agreeableness: warmth, trust, and a preference for cooperation over confrontation.
• •Neuroticism: how strongly and how often you feel negative emotions such as worry, anger, and sadness. A low score reads as calm and steady under pressure.

Two things are worth remembering when you compare results across tests. First, these are continuous traits, so a good report tells you where you sit on each scale, ideally against other people, instead of sorting you into a type. Second, different instruments ask different questions, so small differences between two tests are normal. A large gap on one trait is worth a second look: reread the questions behind it and ask which result sounds more like the person your friends would describe.

Picking a photo is quick and oddly satisfying. You never have to decide whether you agree somewhat or agree strongly with a sentence about yourself, and the whole thing feels closer to a game than a form. That is a real advantage, and probably part of why people still search for this quiz years later.

The trade-off is transparency. A written item such as "I make plans and stick to them" tells you what it is asking, so you can judge whether your answer is honest and see why a score came out the way it did. A photo of a desk does not. The link between your click and your score lives inside the quiz's scoring, and you have to take it on trust. Some people like that, because it is harder to steer your answers toward the result you want. Others find it unsatisfying when a result surprises them and there is nothing to check it against.

Pictures also carry baggage. A quiet beach might read as calm to one person and as boredom to another, and the photo you pick on a given day can reflect taste or mood as much as a stable trait.

That is why most research-grade personality questionnaires, including the public-domain item pools psychologists use for the Big Five, stick to written statements rated on an agreement scale. If you want something that feels like VisualDNA, a picture quiz is the honest answer. If you want results you can understand, question by question, a statement-based test is the better fit.

There is no single replacement for Who Am I?, because people come back to it for different reasons. A rough guide:

• •You want the same experience. Take the current Who Am I? quiz through Nielsen's panels page. The same page lists two other VisualDNA quizzes, the Personality Quiz and the Success Quiz (pitched as a way to find the career path that suits you), though when we checked, only the Success Quiz links loaded.
• •You want the same five traits in a format you can check. A statement-based Big Five test does that. The Open-Source Psychometrics Project's 50-item version takes a few minutes, and our Big Five test with a full report page covers what a fuller report adds.
• •You want something quick and playful to share. 16Personalities is the obvious choice. Its own model page describes five spectrums that rework the Big Five, but results arrive as one of 16 four-letter types (with an assertive or turbulent variant), so your old Who Am I? results will not map onto it one to one. Our 16Personalities alternatives page covers its trade-offs.
• •You want to try several frameworks. Truity offers separate tests for the Big Five, the Enneagram, DISC, a 16-type framework, careers, and more.
• •You care more about strengths than traits. The VIA Survey is free and measures 24 character strengths grouped under six virtues.
• •You want the whole picture: personality plus what you value and how you reason. That is what Opinion DNA is built for, and it is covered in the next section.

One honest caveat. We did not find a well-known, research-grade personality test for the public that uses pictures the way VisualDNA does. If the picture format is the thing you loved, VisualDNA's own quizzes remain the closest match, and everything else on this list asks you to read and rate statements.

Opinion DNA is not a picture quiz, and it is not free, so it is not a like-for-like replacement for the Who Am I? quiz. It is for the person who took VisualDNA's quiz, enjoyed the result, and wanted more of it: more detail, more context, and a better sense of why they think the way they do.

The assessment is 179 written questions and takes about 10 to 15 minutes. It measures 48 dimensions in three layers, and each one gets a continuous score from 0 to 100, shown against the population average.

• •Personality (12 dimensions): the same five Big Five traits Who Am I? reported, plus the Dark Triad measured as everyday trait levels, two styles of emotional regulation, mortality concern, and life satisfaction.
• •Values (24 dimensions): what you think matters, from moral foundations such as Care to personal values such as Self-Direction and social orientation.
• •Meta-Thinking (12 dimensions): how you form and hold beliefs, including Need for Cognition, Intellectual Humility, and primal world beliefs such as whether the world feels basically safe.

The values and meta-thinking layers are the main reason to pick it over a Big Five test. Two people with near-identical Big Five scores can still disagree about almost everything, because one weighs loyalty and tradition heavily and the other weighs fairness and independence. You can browse every dimension on the dimensions hub, and the methodology page explains how the assessment was put together. It was built over three years with more than 60 experts from Oxford, Cambridge, NYU, Royal Holloway, and the University of Pennsylvania, using peer-reviewed psychometric scales.

Your results come with an AI-generated personal report covering your personality, values, and meta-thinking, plus what they mean for your career and relationships. It costs $47, once, with lifetime access to your scores and report and a 30-day money-back guarantee. On data, our position is short: your scores are yours and we do not sell data. If you want to go further, you can compare profiles with a partner, friends, or a co-founder, and only with both people's consent.

If that sounds like the deeper version of what you were looking for when you clicked a VisualDNA photo, take the full assessment.