Design

Skill 29 of 200

User Research

Plan, conduct, and synthesize user research.

1 minute · 190 words · 4 sections

Install

$ npx skills add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins --skill user-research

$ npx skills add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins

» /plugin marketplace add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins

The first command installs just this skill, by the name in its SKILL.md; the second installs the whole repository.

Help plan, execute, and synthesize user research studies.

Research Methods

Method	Best For	Sample Size	Time
User interviews	Deep understanding of needs and motivations	5-8	2-4 weeks
Usability testing	Evaluating a specific design or flow	5-8	1-2 weeks
Surveys	Quantifying attitudes and preferences	100+	1-2 weeks
Card sorting	Information architecture decisions	15-30	1 week
Diary studies	Understanding behavior over time	10-15	2-8 weeks
A/B testing	Comparing specific design choices	Statistical significance	1-4 weeks

Interview Guide Structure

Warm-up (5 min): Build rapport, explain the session
Context (10 min): Understand their current workflow
Deep dive (20 min): Explore the specific topic
Reaction (10 min): Show concepts or prototypes
Wrap-up (5 min): Anything we missed? Thank them.

Analysis Framework

Affinity mapping: Group observations into themes
Impact/effort matrix: Prioritize findings
Journey mapping: Visualize the user experience over time
Jobs to be done: Understand what users are hiring your product to do

Deliverables

Research plan (objectives, methods, timeline, participants)
Interview guide (questions, probes, activities)
Synthesis report (themes, insights, recommendations)
Highlight reel (key quotes and observations)

About this skill

Trigger

Plan, conduct, and synthesize user research. Trigger with "user research plan", "interview guide", "usability test", "survey design", "research questions", or when the user needs help with any aspect of understanding their users through research.

The verbatim description from this skill’s front matter — the string an agent matches on to decide whether to load it.

Colophon for this issue

Colophon

How this issue was made

Source

github.com/anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins, branch main, last pushed 23 September 2026.

Licence

Apache-2.0 — the text of every skill is reproduced unmodified, frontmatter included, under the upstream licence.

Discovery

200 skills found by walking the repository tree for SKILL.md, not by matching a directory convention. 27 distinct layouts observed: bio-research/skills/*/SKILL.md, cowork-plugin-management/skills/*/SKILL.md, customer-support/skills/*/SKILL.md, data/skills/*/SKILL.md, design/skills/*/SKILL.md, engineering/skills/*/SKILL.md, enterprise-search/skills/*/SKILL.md, finance/skills/*/SKILL.md, human-resources/skills/*/SKILL.md, legal/skills/*/SKILL.md, marketing/skills/*/SKILL.md, operations/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/apollo/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/brand-voice/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/common-room/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/slack/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/contact-center/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/meeting-sdk/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/meeting-sdk/web/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/video-sdk/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/virtual-agent/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/zoom-mcp/*/SKILL.md, pdf-viewer/skills/*/SKILL.md, product-management/skills/*/SKILL.md, productivity/skills/*/SKILL.md, sales/skills/*/SKILL.md.

Issue colours

Resolved from the awesome-design-md registry — hue 39°, chroma 0.113. Two accent tones are generated per issue and each is proven against its own ground before it ships: a single accent that passes AA on both light and dark paper is arithmetically impossible.

Typefaces

Display: Copernicus is not available to us; set in Newsreader.

We never load a typeface at request time from a third-party origin, so a brand face we do not already self-host is substituted rather than fetched.

Heading repairs

1 repair applied to this skill so the document has one h1 and no skipped levels:

Removed “User Research”, a leading h1 that duplicated the skill title.

Spec compliance

53 editorial notes across 41 of 200 skills. They are printed in the margin of each skill rather than as errors here.

and 31 more.

Images

Images inside a skill come from the upstream repository. Where the author gave no alternative text we mark the image decorative rather than inventing a description — a plausible caption we made up is worse than none for the reader who depends on it.

Marketplace

A plugin manifest is published at .claude-plugin/marketplace.json by Anthropic, declaring 120 plugins. It is read for editorial metadata only — never as the skill index, which is always the repository tree.

Signal

Install counts come from skills.sh. They measure downloads, not quality, and an unranked repository is not an unread one.

Agent surfaces

The whole issue is available as one markdown document at /anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins.md, and each skill at its own .md URL.

Publication

Set by Skills Docs from the source repository. Body text is Literata at the reader’s chosen size and measure; code is Geist Mono. Nothing on this page was written by us except this paragraph.

Help plan, execute, and synthesize user research studies.

Research Methods

Method	Best For	Sample Size	Time
User interviews	Deep understanding of needs and motivations	5-8	2-4 weeks
Usability testing	Evaluating a specific design or flow	5-8	1-2 weeks
Surveys	Quantifying attitudes and preferences	100+	1-2 weeks
Card sorting	Information architecture decisions	15-30	1 week
Diary studies	Understanding behavior over time	10-15	2-8 weeks
A/B testing	Comparing specific design choices	Statistical significance	1-4 weeks

Interview Guide Structure

Warm-up (5 min): Build rapport, explain the session
Context (10 min): Understand their current workflow
Deep dive (20 min): Explore the specific topic
Reaction (10 min): Show concepts or prototypes
Wrap-up (5 min): Anything we missed? Thank them.

Analysis Framework

Affinity mapping: Group observations into themes
Impact/effort matrix: Prioritize findings
Journey mapping: Visualize the user experience over time
Jobs to be done: Understand what users are hiring your product to do

Deliverables

Research plan (objectives, methods, timeline, participants)
Interview guide (questions, probes, activities)
Synthesis report (themes, insights, recommendations)
Highlight reel (key quotes and observations)