How to Set Up a Screener in User Interviews

Screening participants is simple with User Interviews’s screener builder. With skip logic, a multiple question types, screener templates, and our Premium Screening Add-On, you can vet participants with the highest confidence for your research. 

In this second lesson of the Screener Surveys Deep-Dive course by the User Interviews Academy, you’ll learn:

• How to set up a screener survey in User Interviews
• Best practices for designing a screener survey
• Examples of good screener survey questions

📹 Prefer watching to reading? This content is available as both an article and a video. Watch our Customer Success Manager, Chris Simons, take you through the content in the video below or keep reading to dive in!

How to Set Up a Screener in UI

Creating a screener survey with UI is easy:

1. Create a project and start on the Research Design > Recruitment tab. 
2. Scroll down to the screener survey section and click “add.”
3. If your team often reuses screener survey questions, you can reuse past screeners by choosing the relevant project from the dropdown. Otherwise, you can start from scratch by writing questions and answers, choosing from the various question types, adding skip logic (more on this in the next lesson), and more. 
4. If you often draft screener questions in other tools, it’s easy to bring them into UI. Simply copy and paste answer choices directly into the builder using command or control + v. UI will automatically create a new row for each answer choice added.
5. Be sure to preview your screener before launching to test out your question flow and skip logic. 

To edit your screener survey, return to the same screener section. You can edit your screener as many times as you want before launching your project—but please note that, once the project is launched, any new edits will overwrite your past versions and new participants that apply will take the newest version of your screener. 

📌 Note: If you have the premium screening add-on, you’ll see video and double screening as the premium screening options, under the manual review section (outside of the screener builder). Select the premium screening option you want to use and follow the prompts to add this to your screener.

Reviewing responses and qualifying participants

Once your screener is live and responses start rolling in, it’s time to review and qualify participants. If you’re using manual review, head to the Participant Management tab in your project workspace to see how participants answered your screener. You can approve, reject, or message applicants based on their responses.

Look for clear, relevant answers that align with your study criteria—and pay attention to red flags like vague or inconsistent responses. Open-ended questions are especially helpful here for spotting thoughtful participants and filtering out low-quality submissions.

If you’re using automatic qualification, your skip logic and disqualification settings will determine who gets approved without manual intervention. You can still review responses afterward to double-check that your logic is working as intended.

A quick note on fraud prevention

User Interviews has a sophisticated fraud detection system running behind the scenes to flag suspicious activity and prevent bad actors from entering your study. With only 0.6% of all sessions ever reported for suspected fraud, you can rest assured that you’re unlikely to encounter bad actors on our platform. 

Along with our built-in fraud prevention features, one of the best ways you can protect the integrity of your research is by writing thoughtful, targeted screener questions. Clear, specific screeners not only help you find the right participants—they also act as an extra layer of defense against low-quality or fraudulent responses.

To learn more, read about our defense system for preventing fraud.