UX Research Pack

We built this so you don't have to. If you've ever tried to run a UX research study with an AI agent and watched it hallucinate a persona out of thin air, you know the pain. Research is inherently messy. It lives in scattered spreadsheets, unstructured meeting notes, video recordings with no transcripts, and sticky notes that evaporate when the whiteboard gets cleaned. When you hand that chaos to an agent, you get garbage out. Agents need structure. They need schemas. They need a workflow that enforces discipline from planning through synthesis.

That's why we created the UX Research Pack. It's an end-to-end workflow that covers planning, recruitment, testing, analysis, and synthesis. It gives your agent the scaffolding it needs to produce data-driven personas, coherent journey maps, and actionable insights. No more guessing. No more lost recordings. Just a repeatable, validated process that scales.

The Folder Chaos No One Talks About

Let's be honest: most UX research workflows are held together by duct tape and hope. You have a research/ folder that contains notes.docx, recording_01.mp4, findings_v2.pdf, and a spreadsheet that nobody has updated in three months. When you try to onboard a new researcher, or worse, an AI agent, the context is gone. The agent doesn't know which recording corresponds to which participant. It doesn't know the success metrics for the study. It doesn't know the participant criteria. It just sees noise.

The problem isn't just organization; it's the lack of a standardized schema. Without a structured plan, you're not running a study—you're conducting experiments and hoping for the best. You might pick the wrong method for the question you're asking. You might recruit the wrong participants. You might miss critical insights because you didn't have a framework to synthesize the data. As the Nielsen Norman Group notes, choosing the right UX methods is critical, and each method serves a specific purpose in the product development lifecycle ^[4]. When you skip the planning phase, you skip the rigor.

We designed the UX Research Pack to solve this. It provides a production-grade workflow that forces discipline. Every study starts with a structured plan. Every persona is derived from data, not assumptions. Every journey map is validated against a schema. Your agent can now run research studies with the same consistency as a seasoned practitioner.

What Bad Research Costs You

Ignoring structure isn't free. It costs hours, dollars, and customer trust. When research is unstructured, recruitment becomes a nightmare. You spend weeks finding participants who don't match your criteria, only to realize halfway through that you've been testing the wrong user segment. You lose data because recordings aren't transcribed or tagged. You waste days trying to make sense of unstructured notes.

The cost of bad research compounds. A flawed study leads to flawed insights. Flawed insights lead to flawed design decisions. Flawed design decisions lead to user friction, support tickets, and churn. In a worst-case scenario, you ship a feature that nobody uses because you never validated the assumption. That's not just wasted engineering time; that's a hit to your product's reputation.

ResearchOps is the discipline of optimizing people, processes, and craft to amplify the value of research at scale ^[6]. Without ResearchOps, your research efforts are ad hoc. You're constantly reinventing the wheel. You're not capturing institutional knowledge. You're not building a library of insights that informs future work. You're just reacting.

The UX Research Pack brings ResearchOps to your workflow. It standardizes the process. It enforces schemas. It validates artifacts. It ensures that every study produces reusable, actionable data. You stop wasting hours on manual organization and start focusing on what matters: understanding your users.

A Checkout Study, Done Right

Imagine a team building a new checkout flow for an e-commerce platform. They need to understand where users drop off and why. Without the pack, they might jump straight into usability testing, only to realize they don't have a clear plan, the right participants, or a way to synthesize the findings.

With the pack, the workflow is different. The agent starts by scaffolding the study using scaffold-study.sh. This creates a standardized directory structure: plan/, participants/, recordings/, notes/, artifacts/. Everything has a place. No more guessing.

Next, the agent populates templates/research-plan.yaml. This template forces the team to define objectives, hypotheses, methodology, participant criteria, tasks, and success metrics. For the checkout study, the plan might specify: "Objective: Identify friction points in the payment step. Hypothesis: Users abandon checkout when asked to create an account before payment. Methodology: Moderated usability testing with 5 participants. Participant criteria: Users who have abandoned a cart in the last 30 days. Success metrics: Task completion rate > 80%, SUS score > 68."

The agent then uses the plan to recruit participants. It filters candidates against the criteria. It schedules sessions. It records the tests. When the usability testing is complete, the agent uses templates/journey-map.json to map the user's journey through the checkout flow. The JSON schema ensures that every phase, action, thought, emotion, pain point, and opportunity is captured consistently. No more missing data. No more inconsistent formats.

Finally, the agent synthesizes the findings. It uses references/synthesis-frameworks.md to apply affinity mapping and JTBD (Jobs-to-be-Done) analysis. It transforms raw data into actionable design recommendations. It creates templates/persona.yaml populated with real quotes, goals, and pain points from the study. The result is a set of artifacts that are ready to hand off to design and engineering.

This is the power of structure. The UX Research Pack turns a chaotic process into a repeatable workflow. It ensures that every study produces high-quality, actionable insights.

What Changes Once the Pack Is Installed

Once you install the pack, your workflow changes fundamentally. Your agent no longer guesses; it follows a proven process. Here's what happens:

• Planning becomes rigorous. The research-plan.yaml template forces you to define objectives, hypotheses, methodology, and success metrics before you recruit a single participant. You stop running studies in the dark.
• Recruitment becomes precise. The participant criteria in the plan act as a filter. You only recruit users who match your target segment. You stop wasting time on irrelevant feedback.
• Testing becomes consistent. The scaffold-study.sh script creates a standardized directory structure. Every recording, note, and artifact is organized. You stop losing data.
• Synthesis becomes actionable. The synthesis-frameworks.md reference guides the agent through affinity mapping, JTBD, and insight generation. You stop with raw data and start with recommendations.
• Validation becomes automatic. The validate-study.sh script checks every artifact against the schemas. It exits non-zero if required files are missing or structures are invalid. You stop shipping incomplete studies.

The pack also includes canonical references on UX research methods and synthesis frameworks. These references ensure that your agent follows best practices. They cover planning, recruitment, usability testing, interviews, surveys, and synthesis techniques ^[1]. They detail affinity mapping, JTBD, and how to transform raw data into actionable design recommendations ^[8]. Your agent is now equipped with the knowledge of a seasoned researcher.

The result? Faster studies. Higher quality insights. More actionable recommendations. You stop wasting hours on manual organization and start focusing on what matters: building better products.

What's in the UX Research Pack

This is a multi-file deliverable. Every file serves a specific purpose in the workflow. Here's what you get:

• skill.md — Orchestrator skill defining the UX Research workflow, referencing all templates, scripts, validators, references, and examples. Guides the agent through planning, recruitment, testing, analysis, and synthesis phases.
• templates/research-plan.yaml — Production-grade YAML template for structuring UX research studies. Includes fields for objectives, hypotheses, methodology, participant criteria, tasks, and success metrics.
• templates/persona.yaml — Structured YAML template for creating data-driven personas. Captures demographics, goals, frustrations, behaviors, and JTBD statements derived from research.
• templates/journey-map.json — JSON Schema and template for customer journey maps. Defines phases, actions, thoughts, emotions, pain points, and opportunities for visualization and analysis.
• scripts/scaffold-study.sh — Executable bash script to scaffold a new research study directory. Creates standardized folders for plan, participants, recordings, notes, and artifacts based on the study name.
• validators/validate-study.sh — Executable validator script that checks research artifacts against schemas and templates. Exits non-zero if required files are missing or YAML/JSON structure is invalid.
• references/ux-methodologies.md — Canonical reference on UX research methods. Covers planning, recruitment, usability testing, interviews, surveys, and synthesis techniques with actionable guidance.
• references/synthesis-frameworks.md — Canonical reference on synthesis frameworks. Details affinity mapping, JTBD, insight generation, and how to transform raw data into actionable design recommendations.
• examples/worked-plan.yaml — Worked example of a completed research plan using the template. Demonstrates realistic objectives, participant profiles, and task flows for a checkout flow study.
• examples/worked-persona.yaml — Worked example of a completed persona. Shows populated fields from research data, including quotes, goals, and pain points to guide design decisions.

Every file is production-ready. Every template is schema-validated. Every script is executable. You don't need to build anything. You just install and run.

Install and Ship

Stop guessing. Start validating. Upgrade to Pro to install the UX Research Pack and give your agent the workflow it needs to produce high-quality, actionable insights. Your research will finally be structured, scalable, and actionable.