research-planning

research-planning is a skill for Claude Code from Owl-Listener/designpowers. It costs 37 tokens per session (783 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A plan for user research, meaning the work of gathering evidence about people, their needs, and how they behave before designing a product.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to identify knowledge gaps, write research questions, choose suitable research methods, and decide who should take part.
Why use it?
It turns untested assumptions and disagreements into focused questions that research can answer.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the designpowers plugin — 36 skills, 10 agents, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it to identify knowledge gaps, write research questions, choose suitable research methods, and decide who should take part.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/owl-listener/designpowers/research-planning
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add Owl-Listener/designpowers --skill research-planning
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Owl-Listener/designpowers

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install designpowers, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 36 skills, 10 agents, 1 hook.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for research-planning

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/designpowers/research-planning/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/designpowers/research-planning)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/designpowers/research-planning"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/designpowers/research-planning/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for research-planning

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/designpowers/research-planning"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/designpowers/research-planning.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 37 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 783 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00037 $0.00783
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.00392
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00157
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00078

Measured 9d ago against content hash 705fb38576cf, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

research-planning scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/research-planning/SKILL.md · 97 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 97 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Research Planning

Research is how we replace assumptions with evidence. This skill structures what you need to learn before committing to a design direction.

When to Use

  • The design brief identifies unknowns about users, context, or behaviour
  • The team is making decisions based on assumptions rather than evidence
  • A design is being created for a new audience or unfamiliar context
  • Stakeholders disagree about user needs

Process

Step 1: Identify Knowledge Gaps

Review the design brief and list:

  • What do we know about the people who will use this? (Evidence-backed)
  • What do we assume? (Believed but unverified)
  • What do we not know? (Acknowledged gaps)

Present this to the user. Assumptions and unknowns become research questions.

Step 2: Frame Research Questions

Convert gaps into answerable questions. Good research questions are:

  • Specific — "How do users with screen readers navigate multi-step forms?" not "Is the form accessible?"
  • Observable — focused on behaviour, not opinion
  • Actionable — the answer will change a design decision

Aim for 3-5 research questions. More than that means you need to narrow scope.

Step 3: Select Methods

Match methods to questions:

Question Type Recommended Methods
"What do people currently do?" Journey mapping, diary studies, contextual inquiry
"Why do people struggle with X?" Usability testing, think-aloud protocols
"What do people need?" Interviews, jobs-to-be-done analysis
"Which approach works better?" A/B testing, preference testing, card sorting
"How does our offering compare?" Competitive analysis, heuristic evaluation
"Who are we designing for?" Persona development, ability spectrum mapping

Step 4: Plan for Inclusion

Every research plan must address:

  • Participant diversity — include people with disabilities, different ages, different technical literacy, different languages
  • Method accessibility — ensure research methods themselves are accessible (e.g., interview formats that work for people with communication differences)
  • Situational contexts — include scenarios of stress, distraction, low bandwidth, unfamiliar environments

Read the full file on GitHub · 97 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 97 lines · 37 tokens per session scan A 705fb38576cf

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research-planning is a skill published in the GitHub repository Owl-Listener/designpowers (243 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 37 tokens to every session and 783 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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