A research brief is the one page that keeps a study honest. It names what you're trying to find out, who you need to hear from, and what decision the findings feed. Write it before you recruit anyone — if you can't fill it in yet, the study isn't ready to run.
What a brief covers
The skill writes a full plan: background, stakeholders, hypotheses, goals, success criteria, methodology, participants, deliverables, and a timeline. It also forces a distinction people skip. "Signups are down" is a business problem, not a user problem, and the brief won't let the two get merged into one goal.
Install in Claude Code
Run two commands in your Claude Code session, one at a time — send the first and wait for it to finish before you send the second. Pasted together they read as a single command and the install never runs.
/plugin marketplace add transformteamsg/dx-harness/plugin install dx-harness@dx-harnessThe research brief ships inside the dx-harness plugin alongside the design
skills — invoke it with /dx-harness:dx-design-research-brief.
Using the skill
Give it whatever you have: a Slack message, a half-formed hunch, a stakeholder request. "We want to know why people stop using the app after week two" is enough to start from.
Say "help me plan this study" or "I need a research brief" and it takes over from there. It asks for what's missing rather than guessing at an objective or a participant count.