Intro to Screener Surveys with User Interviews

Welcome to the Screener Surveys Deep-Dive course by the User Interviews Academy. Screener surveys are a vital component of recruiting the best-fit participants for your research. When used effectively, they improve the quality of your insights, protect the integrity of your research, and reduce the amount of time spent reviewing applicants.

User Interviews provides a robust set of tools to build, preview, and manage screener surveys. From manual reviews to automatic screening, match percentage calculations, and built-in fraud prevention, UI enables researchers to create efficient and effective screeners. 

In this first lesson of this course, you’ll learn:

• What are screener surveys and why they’re important 
• When you might want to use manual vs. automatic screening
• Types of screening supported by User Interviews

📹 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!

What are screener surveys?

Screener surveys are a set of questions given to study applicants to vet their suitability to participate in research. By asking qualifying questions prior to accepting applicants, you can filter out participants who don’t meet key criteria, ensuring that your insights come from the right people. 

When you recruit using User Interviews, you can take advantage of advanced screening features, including highly customizable logic, various question types, your choice of manual vs. automatic screener review, the ability to save templates for reuse, and more. 

Why screener surveys matter

Screener surveys are a strategic tool for defining exactly who you want to hear from in your research. While Recruit and Hub offer built-in participant data (like demographics, location, or past participation history), screeners let you go beyond these characteristics to dive deeper into behavioral, attitudinal, or experiential criteria.

For example, if you're looking for people who’ve recently switched from one software tool to another, or those who follow a specific workflow or habit, you’re unlikely to find that level of detail in a profile alone. With screener questions, you can ask directly, and tailor your study to those exact experiences.

Screeners also help you:

• Prevent participant fraud by asking for questions that check for consistency and expertise
• Surface niche segments based on goals, opinions, or product familiarity
• Fine-tune targeting for multi-step studies like longitudinal or diary research
• Ensure data quality by only bringing in participants who precisely match your criteria

By taking the time to write a thoughtful screener, you're setting your study up for success—bringing in relevant voices and reducing noise in your insights. All in all, one of the best things you can do as a researcher to prevent fraud and find the best participants is to build great screeners following best practices.

📌 Note: When you’re sourcing participants from our Recruit panel, screener surveys are required. When you’re inviting participants using Hub, screeners are optional (but recommended!). 

Manual vs. automatic screening

When you recruit with User Interviews, you can choose to review screener surveys manually or automatically. 

• Manual screening: Researchers review each application and manually decide if someone qualifies. This gives you full control over the screening process, but requires more time.
• Automatic screening: UI’s system uses your defined criteria to automatically accept or reject participants. This can save you time and energy during the recruitment process, but you’ll need to be mindful of how you set up your screener to avoid mistakenly including or excluding the wrong folks — we’ll cover everything you need to know in this course. 

For both manual and automatic screening, UI calculates a match percentage based on how closely the participant’s screener responses align with the study criteria, and participants are marked as qualified or disqualified based on this score. UI’s screener builder makes it easy for you to define which answers are required to qualify and set auto-disqualification rules on specific responses. When you’re building your screener, you can mark specific answers to automatically “accept” or “reject” the participant—this feature sets the foundation for how match percentage is calculated. 

Types of screening supported by UI

With UI’s premium screening add-on, you can add additional layers of screening to increase your confidence in finding the right participants. 

There are two different ways you can utilize the Premium Screening add-on at UI, including:

• Video screening: With our video screening feature, participants upload a short video answering a custom prompt during the screening phase. You review their video before approving them for your project. 
• Double screening: With double screening, you can optionally contact participants to confirm details or ask follow-up questions (via call, text, or email).

Premium screening is great for:

• B2B studies where you need to hear participants explain their work or experience.
• Studies that require a specific demeanor or communication skills. 
• Concept testing or in-depth interviews needing more qualitative depth.