Preparing a portal for a visit study

Hosts sometimes spend the week before a study polishing labels and hiding the paper forms. Please do not. We need the portal as visitors meet it on an ordinary morning, including the handwritten sign and the clerk’s extra chair.

What we do need is consent wording. In Penang we use a short card in English and Bahasa Malaysia: who we are, that we are watching the visit not the person, that we will not record faces, and that anyone may refuse. The host puts the card where people already wait.

We also need a named host on the floor. Not a steering committee. One person who can nod us toward a spare chair and who knows which rooms are noisy at 9 a.m.

Logins, if we must use a test account, should be real enough to hit the same stalls. A sanitised demo that skips the slow calendar is not a portal visit.

Finally, tell the clerks. An unannounced observer looks like an audit. We are not an audit. We are there to write down visits so the clerks’ spoken exceptions can sit in the same brief as the screens.

If those four things are ready — unchanged floor, consent card, host, and a warning to the counter — the window can start on time.

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