I'm starting some lab testing and I'm an on-the-job trained UXer and have watched a decent number of tests, but haven't constructed a lot on my own.
When doing a more formal test and not a guerrilla test, is it important to begin with simple baseline tasks to determine a participant's savvy?
If so, what type of tasks perform the best for determining that?
Right now, I ask participants to find the website based on how they would at home, hoping that will show me at least "Do they know about Google? Do they know how to use a computer well enough to navigate to a search engine and find a result inside the search engine?" as well as good data to show a client any frustrations in how a normal user may find their site.