Screener surveys, or “screeners”, are a set of questions used to filter and select players who meet certain requirements. It's like a quick check to see if a player is a good fit for the playtest. If the player meets the criteria, they can be invited to the playtest; if not, they are excluded.

While they seem straightforward, screener surveys are actually very easy to get wrong. This article has one objective, giving you the tips and resources to design your next screener that will get results you can rely on.

Sections in this article:

We want to ensure you get the most value from this article whether you have a minute or an hour to spare. We've summarised the best practices below for a quick read, with in-depth details and examples further down the page.

Designing a screener is never the starting point of your research study. You should start by asking yourself “What is the goal of my research study?”

Consider what insight would be most useful, then work backward to figure out who could best provide that insight. Once you have the right participants in mind, you can start designing screening questions to recruit these players.

To go deeper here, we have published a Mobile Playtesting Playbook. There, you will find several chapters dedicated to:

There are two types of information you want to collect from players before inviting them to a research study. These two targeting categories are the following:

Are you aiming your game at certain demographics, such as target age ranges and gender, or what devices players use or have experience using?

This may be important when you are testing appreciation of your game and understanding among your target audience, but there may also be certain playtests where you can test more widely.

At PlaytestCloud, we automatically provide you with players demographic information, allowing you to request playtests tailored only to specific demographics directly through the order form, without the need for a screener survey.

Are you aiming to recruit players who have specific gaming experiences or preferences, such as affinity for a specific genre or brand, familiarity with a competitor's game, or involvement in a particular leisure activity?

While these aspects might generally align with your demographic definitions, they could also vary and will likely revolve around the current and previous gaming experiences and preferences you intend for your playtesters to possess.

Here, you’ll want to use a screener survey to discover the extent of players' experience and affinity concerning various aspects you may be interested in, such as:

Once you have your target audience in mind you’ll first want to write questions that will help you assess if a respondent qualifies to be invited to your research study or not.

The second part consists in structuring your screener questions, to organize them like a funnel to narrow down participants, starting with broad questions and moving to more specific questions.

Writing questions and getting started can be hard at times. This section of the article will try to compile the best practices you want to adopt, as well as the pitfalls you want to avoid while writing your questions.

At PlaytestCloud, we start our surveys with a free text question, to help respondents “get in the mood” of the screener.

This first question invites players to take a moment, to think about the games they've played recently and communicate an answer in a written form. Knowing if a player is articulated before a 1:1 interview for example, is always important.

We encourage you to use the plain language method, to ensure the respondents understand your survey as quickly, easily, and completely as possible.

We recommend that you explain all of the jargon, acronyms, and abbreviations you might use in your questions. It is also good practice to illustrate terms with examples.

There is no need to be upfront about your research goals in your screener. During this step, you want to discover how the respondents behave.

Let’s say you are interested in recruiting players experienced with Candy Crush Saga to your next research study.

In this example we do not mention the target game in the question, letting the respondent select it or not, without leading their choice.

We have also added a dummy option with the game Caramel Crush Saga. This fake game is here to catch careless respondents, who might want to select all options available in order to maximize their chances to be invited to your study.

It's also important to steer clear of leading and loaded questions which make assumptions about the respondents preferences by using strong language. These questions can subtly push the player to respond in a certain way, making it difficult for them to provide an honest response.

An open-ended question is a question that cannot be answered with a "yes" or a "no" response. They are pretty much the gold standard of question type that we use to screen our players.

Open-ended questions also give you the opportunity to collect additional information about affinity and frequency, while telling you about the respondent’s behavior.

Yes or No questions should be kept for specific cases, where you want to share requirements or get your respondent’s approval before a study.

While we always think that our players are honest with us, we do sometimes get incorrect or untruthful responses. That is why we are using knowledge-based questions, to make sure players have the level of experience they say they have.

One pitfall is to avoid is that you don't want to make these questions so hard that even the most experienced players might not know the answer. Therefore, questions asking about the name of a core resource/feature or main character work well here.

When using a multiple choice question type, the choices presented to the respondents should not overlap and they should cover all possible answers to the question.

Trust us, you'll always want to make sure you're not adding overlapping values to your answer choices. This correct way of bordering values is very helpful when you are sorting out your data.

Don't assume you've covered all possible answers when writing multiple choice questions.

You should always include an option for 'none of the above', 'I'm not sure', 'I've never heard of it', or 'other' to accommodate unexpected responses.

Otherwise, players will be forced to choose an answer that might not apply to them. You could then end up accidentally inviting players who should not be in the playtest, or even exclude players who match your criteria but who's responses didn't precisely align with the options you offered.

Here we’ll share a couple of questions we like to use to see how frequently people play a game, and how much experience they have with it.

It helps us to combine terms like “sometimes”, with a quantified metric (at least 2 days a week).

At PlaytestCloud, we have decided to measure the frequency of playing, using the number of days people play a game, over the course of a week. We find it a more reliable metric than let say, the number of hours spent in-game. It is easy to quickly assess how many times per week you are dedicated to playing a game, as opposed to keeping track of the number of hours. Great video games are very good at having us lose track of time :)

That said, if the number of hours played on a certain game is a crucial factor to define your audience, here is how we would go about writing the question.

Another way to measure affinity or experience, is to use questions with ratings with variable values. Here is a good example:

Once you have your questions you'll need to organise them. The aim here is to create a structure that allows for accurate filtering, effective analysis, and a seamless experience for the respondents. Below we've listed a few strategies that will help you do this.

A well rounded screener doesn’t need to be long, in fact, it should be short. We like to keep our screeners short and sweet, with a max length of x10 questions.

The order of the questions you ask should follow a simple structure. The goal is to group the questions into sections, and go from broad to specific questions.

Here is an order you could follow:

In screener surveys, page breaks are game changers! They improve the user experience by dividing the survey into logical sections, reducing fatigue, maintaining data integrity, and preventing players from changing their responses to questions on previous pages.

To maintain the survey's flow, we recommend to place page breaks after each section.

If you would like to get in touch with the Research Operations team at PlaytestCloud, reach out to us via email at hello@playtestcloud.com. We have experience recruiting players and we would love to talk about screener design with you :)