The study ends on 4 December and the analysis runs to 18 December, which is two working weeks with a holiday closure at the end of them. Turning nine weeks of responses into answers is real work, and it has to happen either way.
Doing that work now, against invented data, is what makes December the part where we read the answers rather than the part where we build the thing that produces them.
Not quite the order the calendar says, because all of it moved at once. It is the order the work depends on, which is the part that matters.
What the study is trying to learn, the measures it will be judged on, the groups of people each one is counted among, and the calendar it all runs on.
The four surveys, the interview guides, the diary prompts and the contact schedule. You cannot write a question until you know which measure it has to answer, so nothing here could be drafted before the plan settled.
The instruments decide what can be shown at all, because a panel cannot display something nothing collects. The existing panel decides what must not be lost. The plan decides what counts and against which group. And the design rules decide how it appears: counts before percentages, every figure naming its population, nothing not measured drawn as a zero, and no view that cannot say who acts on it.
Building the screen sent a requirement back the other way. Four fields on the participant card turned out to be collected by no instrument in the study, which was only visible once somebody tried to draw them. The panel found a gap in the instruments rather than the other way round.
Every view names who acts on it and what they do. A view that cannot name its own consequence is not a view, and two features were cut for failing that test.
Product activity arrives on its own. Everything else is a spreadsheet somebody uploads, so those figures are only ever as current as the last upload. Each file has its own slot, and the panel shows what changed before anything is saved.
Somebody passes 21 days without using any of the three main features. Logging in and looking at the dashboard do not count and do not reset the clock.
The inactive list, with who has not been contacted yet, marked as this week's work.
The study lead, or whoever is running the week.
Offer that person a short interview about why they stopped. The target is two or three of them, not all of them.
A wave closes. Intake, Week 2, Week 6, then exit.
How many people answered, and how that compares with the waves before it.
The study lead.
Chase the people who have not answered personally, rather than sending another reminder, and leave the window open longer.
The exit survey closes on 7 December and the last upload lands.
All nine measures at once, each with its target, its reading, the group it was measured on, and its verdict.
The team, in the readout.
Read the answers. Not build the thing that reads them.
Drawn from what the panel states on its own screens, not from a description of it. The activity, the dates and the people are invented so the panel could be reviewed before the study opens.
There are no live connections, so the panel never says the word connected. It says who uploaded what, and when, and it goes stale loudly rather than quietly.
| Source | Who | How often | What it carries, and what breaks without it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product activity | Nobody | Continuous | The only feed that arrives on its own. Messages, forecasts opened, days used. |
| The participant tracker | Two update it, the study lead uploads it | Weekly | The sheet the research firm keeps, and the single most load-bearing feed here. It carries who is enrolled, who is in the depth group, whether each Care Guide session was actually attended, and each person’s contact status. Three people keep it true: the research firm updates enrolment and contact status, the Human Care Guide ticks off each session after it happens, and the study lead exports it and uploads it here each week. Every percentage on the panel divides by it, and it is also the exclusion list, so without it the figures are not merely stale, they silently include test accounts. It is also where the two identifiers meet. The research firm issues a participant identifier and the participant has a username in the product, and both sit on the tracker, which is what lets a survey answer be joined to what somebody actually did. That join used to be a file somebody built by hand, and it was the largest single source of data that could not be matched up. It reaches the panel as a weekly export from one worksheet built for the purpose, which carries the study columns and no names, no emails and no payment amounts. The working sheet keeps everything personal and is never exported. |
| Recruitment screener | Research firm | Once, before Week 1 | How much care somebody provides and whether they live with the person they care for. It is what decides who is worth interviewing when somebody goes quiet. |
| Survey responses | Study lead | Four times | Exported straight out of the form tool without renaming a column. Seven of the nine measures live in the last of these four. |
| Deploy log | Back end developer | After each release | Which build a person was answering about. A survey wave that straddles a release averages two different products into one figure, which is exactly how an earlier study lost most of its metrics. |
Every upload is kept, so a wrong file can be rolled back to the one before it. Before anything saves, the panel shows how many rows moved, any column it did not recognise, and anybody in the file who is not on the roster.
This is the part of the panel that decides whether the thing worked. Nine measures, each with a target agreed before anybody was recruited, and each naming the group of people it is measured on. Nothing here is typed in. Every percentage below is worked out in your browser from the counts underneath it, the same way the real screen works it out from the uploaded file. The dashed line on each bar is the target.
Switch it between the two states. Mid-study is the honest picture six weeks in: the exit survey has not been sent, so seven of the nine cannot be scored at all and the screen says so rather than showing a zero.
The product knows a great deal. The point of the panel is that almost none of that reaches a screen as it arrived, because a screenful of raw material is somebody else's work to do, not a finished thought.
The last study had no export. Everything anybody needed came out by screenshotting a screen, or by copy and pasting while scrolling and hoping the selection held. That cost somewhere around ten hours, and none of those hours produced anything: it was the same numbers, moved by hand, into a document that then had to be checked against the screen it came from.
So this one has an export button on every view that shows a figure, and it was in the plan before any of the views were. A panel that can only be read is a panel you have to transcribe, and transcription is where numbers go wrong.
Four things are left out on purpose, and the panel says so on its own screen rather than leaving somebody to notice. What people typed to the assistant, because a conversation carries health information about people who are not in the study and never agreed to be in it. What the AI costs to run, because the study is not asking about money. Any inactivity cut other than 21 days, because 21 is the one trigger anybody agreed to act on and offering 14 or 30 invites a number nobody will do anything with. And account management, which is the only thing here that changes the product rather than reading from it, so it is kept apart from every page that only reads.
The first of those is the one worth saying out loud. It is not a feature that got lost, it is the research plan being enforced on a screen.
The panel we already have counts boundaries held and boundaries missed as two totals, side by side. This one sorts errors by whether they could have harmed somebody medically, emotionally or financially, which is what the team asked for in August, and it treats one as enough to stop.
Those are not the same information, and for a while the second one quietly replaced the first. On the older screen 273 missed sits beside 230 held, and 273 alone reads very differently from 273 beside 230. A boundary that was correctly held had become invisible.
It is back. Each person's record now shows their safety events one at a time, each marked as a boundary held or a boundary missed, because a boundary the product correctly held is not a failure and collapsing the two into one number is what makes a safety figure unreadable.
What is still not there is the pair as cohort totals, the way the older summary put 273 next to 230. That is the remaining question rather than a decision already taken, and it is an addition rather than a rebuild.
It looked finished. It was a picture of a panel. The figures had been transcribed carefully and still disagreed with the data they came from, which is the whole argument against transcribing. It now works every figure out from the answers behind it.
Nothing in this study re-engages a participant who goes quiet, so the alert had no owner and no next step.
A workflow with states implies a team working through it and an end it reaches. There is exactly one decision available here, and the tiers that queue needed do not exist yet.
Inherited from an earlier specification and pulled back. Most figures already show their detail in the same view, so opening was ceremony. Two things open now, a person's name and a measure's reading, because they are the only two that hide anything.
The numbers mean nothing to anyone outside the few people who wrote them, and a document that says “KR 1.3 cannot be scored” forces every reader to go and look it up, or worse, to nod along without knowing what was lost.Why every measure on this page is named rather than numbered
The panel is not the study. It is December's work, done in August.