# Research brief

> Turn a rough research ask into a scoped brief before you talk to a single user.

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-harness
```

The 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.