Step 5: Screening participants and scheduling time slots When you post an advertisement on Craig’s List or elsewhere, you are likely to get responses. But how do you know if the respondents are the people you actually want to interview? This is why screening participants is the most critical part of the planning phase. You must choose participants who match your hypothesized target customers to ascertain if you are validating the correct problem with your solution. This is where thoughtful construction of screening questions comes into play. Look at your provisional persona and think about the critical characteristics needed. Don’t fill your interview with friends or family. By doing so, your study is no longer a “controlled” experiment. As is discussed in Chapter 3, good screener questions help you to weed-out the wrong people. Yet, whereas you conducted them in person in Chapter 3, you can do it digitally now. You might ask respondents to your advertisement to answer questions that you know are deal breakers. You could send them to a tool such as Survey Monkey or even a Google document. For the treatment center operation, we needed a subject matter expert (SME) to screen our candidates. Whenever a person responded to our ad, that person’s information was captured in a document available to the entire digital team and client. You can see an example of this template in Figure 8-7.