Screener Survey Best Practices

A well-designed screener survey is the foundation of a strong recruit. Whether or not you use our premium screening add-on for added assurance and security, your screener should help you confidently identify participants who truly match your research goals. 

In this lesson of our Screener Surveys Deep-Dive, we offer eight best practices to help you avoid common screener survey mistakes and create screeners that work. 

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

1. Define your target criteria first. 

Before writing your screener, get clear on who you're trying to recruit. Targeting criteria usually fall into four buckets:

• Demographics: Age, gender, education, income, location
• Psychographics: Attitudes, opinions, values
• Behaviors: Habits, product usage, job tasks
• Firmographics (for B2B): Job title, industry, company size, tools used

🧠 Pro tip: Start with your research goals and work backwards. What do you need to learn—and who’s in the best position to give you that insight?

2. Focus on behaviors over demographics. 

While demographics may be relevant, behavioral targeting is often more predictive of a participant’s value, and it makes it easier to vet participants for fraud. 

For example, instead of asking “are you a manager?” try asking: “Have you managed people at work in the past 6 months?” This is a better way to phrase the question because job titles don’t always reflect actual responsibilities—and past behavior often better predicts future experience.

3. Ask clear, objective questions (without giving too much away). 

Good screener questions are:

• Precise (avoid ambiguity)
• Non-leading (don’t give away the “right” answer)
• Answerable (make sure participants can realistically respond)
• Relevant (tie directly to your target criteria)

For example, instead of asking, “Do you consider yourself tech-savvy?” try: “How often do you use Excel or Google Sheets at work?”

4. Use the right question types.

User Interviews supports a variety of question formats to help you screen effectively:

• Pick one / Pick any: Good for qualification logic (e.g., must select "Yes")
• Short/Long answer: Use for open-ended input, but review manually
• Grid questions : Combine related questions into one (faster for participants)
• Video response: Best for communication skills or deep context (Premium only)

5. Keep your screener short (<15 questions).

Long screeners = lower completion rates. Most high-quality screeners are limited to 5-10 target questions, which participants can complete within 10 minutes or less. When in doubt, cut anything that’s “nice to know” but not essential for qualification.

6. Watch out for leading or disqualifying language.

Avoid wording that makes the “right” answer obvious to prevent participants from trying to “game” the survey. 

For example, a leading question might look like: “As someone who shops online weekly, how would you rate your experience?” Instead, you can rephrase the question to be more neutral, like: “How often do you shop online for personal use?”

You should also try to avoid:

• Yes/No questions when other formats are more effective.
• Questions that directly echo your study title or goal.
• Instructions like “select yes if this applies to you.”

7. Allow for open responses strategically.

Open-ended questions can help you gather nuance and gain a better understanding of the participant’s perspective and communication style—but only when you’re willing to manually review responses, and you’re asking for context, not qualification. Use long-answer sparingly, and combine with closed-ended questions for efficiency.

8. Use pages to hide and break up screener questions. 

UI’s screener builder allows you to set up multiple pages and put as many or as few questions on each page as you like. One common mistake we see folks make is putting all of their screener questions on one page—depending on the questions, this can easily signal to participants what criteria they need to qualify, which sometimes leads to fraud or misrepresentation. 

If any of your questions might influence how a participant answers previous questions, then you should put those questions on a new page. 

We know this is a lot of information, but don’t worry—we’ve included these tips directly in the UI app for reference as you’re building your screener: 

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