Screener questionnaires, or “screeners”, are surveys people take before participating in a research study. They’re made up of a few questions, designed to exclude the respondents who aren’t your intended audience and identify the ones who are.

While they seem straightforward, they’re 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.

First, you 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.

Some of the best practices we follow at PlaytestCloud are:

Include a free text question

At PlaytestCloud, we start our questionnaire 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 play and articulate their answer in a written form. Knowing if a player is articulated before a 1:1 interview for example, is always important.

Use plain language

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 terms you might use in your questions. It is also good practice to illustrate terms with examples.

Favor multiple choice questions

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 types, 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.

Don’t reveal what you want to discover

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.

Note that it’s always best practice to include a catchall alternative option. In this case “None of the above”.

We have also added here, 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.

Trust but verify

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.

Tips on assessing Affinity and frequency

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:

Avoid overlapping values in your questions

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.

Keep your screener short

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.

Start with broad then specific questions

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

Here is an order you could follow:

*Note that it is not necessary to ask this on PlaytestCloud since we provide this information automatically. Learn More

If you would like to get in touch with the Project Management 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 :)