In this Step, you will:
What is a Screener for?
When you're recruiting for user research, chances are that you want a specific type of person. Maybe you're only interested in pet owners who have an iPhone or sales managers with more than 10 employees. Whatever you're looking for, you're going to have to find some way to find people who meet your criteria.
That's what a screener does.
Very simply, a screener is a short survey that will qualify or disqualify people as participants for your study. We'll get into how to actually get the screener in front of people in Step 3, but first, we need to figure out how to write an effective one.
The Structure of a Screener
Screeners should be made up of mostly multiple choice questions, in order to make things easy for users. In order to maximize the number of people who finish, they shouldn't be more 7 questions long, unless absolutely necessary. Nothing will get a person to bounce faster than 15 essay questions they're expected to answer for the chance to win a $25 gift card.
The Elements of the Screener
The first thing you need to do is to identify the person you're looking for and write down the key characteristics. These will vary depending on the type of product you're building. This guide doesn't cover deciding on what sort of person to interview.
For the purposes of this guide, we're going to screen for participants who might use Jobs4Pets, the premier job market for animals (Yes, it's a stupid product. No, it doesn't exist. Yet). In this case, we're trying to find people who meet the following criteria:
Once we know who we're looking for, we need to write some questions to ask the potential participants. We're going to ask the following kinds of questions:
Qualifying Questions
These are questions in your survey to determine whether or not the person qualifies as a participant.
Qualifying questions might be something like:
How many dogs do you own?
What sort of cell phone do you have?
In order to find the sort of participants we want, we would only select people who claimed to have more than 2 dogs and an iPhone or Android phone.
If you're running the tests in person, the participant's location is another important qualifying question. You'll need to specify where the sessions will be held and ask if the participant is able to attend.
Disqualifying Questions
In many cases, especially if you're planning to offer an incentive, you need to make sure that you aren't telegraphing what you're looking for. You see, if you are offering a $100 gift card to anybody who meets your requirements, it's important that you make sure your requirements aren't obvious to everybody, lest you end up with a bunch of liars who just want the money.
I will often control for this by putting one or two trick questions into the screener. I've been known to do something like the following:
Which of the following job sites have you used? (Select all that apply)
Someone who is just trying to get selected is likely to select all of the above job sites, but two of those job sites don't exist. Anybody who selects options 2 or 4 is clearly lying in order to get selected.
Sanity Checks
This is also known as "screening for crazy." The fact is that some people make better test participants than others. For example, people who can string a few words into a coherent sentence tend to be better at giving feedback than those who can't.
While most of your questions in the screener should be multiple choice in order to make it as quick and painless as possible for people to fill out, I like to include one freeform response. Anybody who enters information in all caps or who writes gibberish or who skips this completely is automatically disqualified.
An example of our Jobs4Pets screener might be:
Tell us, briefly, about why you decided to get a dog:
(A sane response might be something like:)
"I've always owned dogs. They are great companions and provide security for my small flock of sheep."
I'll leave you to imagine what a less sane answer would be. If your imagination fails you, trust me when I say that you'll learn soon enough.
The Most Important Question
The questions you ask will obviously depend on the type of participant you're looking for, but the last item should always be the same.
That item is some variation of:
Please provide your email address so that we can contact you to schedule a time if you qualify for this research study.
If you prefer to contact people by phone, you may ask for a phone number, but you are very likely to get fewer people who complete the screener. Just remember, whatever else you do, the most important thing you can ask a user is how to contact them again!
Why Does This Matter?
Your research depends on interviewing the right type of people, especially if you're doing customer development interviews or trying to figure out if you have product market fit. If you're developing a product for race car drivers, it won't help you to interview people without a drivers license.
Bad screeners get you bad participants. By recruiting only people in your target persona group, you end up getting good data more quickly.