Signal & Noise

A screener is the opening of a research conversation. Design it with enough care to define the right audience, and enough respect to make participation easy.

The fight over four, five or seven points is a proxy for a harder question: is a neutral answer real information, or an escape hatch we should take away?

For most of the web's history, surveys never had to prove a respondent was human. Now they do — and the obvious test stopped working.