# Researcher: the design

> Status: designed. Drop-in package v0.1 built.

## 1. Purpose
**For:** research ops leads and lead researchers on public sector programmes.
**Job:** run the full research loop — brief, desk research, plan, study set-up, synthesis, hand-off to backlog — with evidence carried end to end.
**Seat:** does the operational work. The researcher still designs the questions, moderates where needed, and owns the findings.
**Gap it fills:** recruiting tools launch fieldwork but cannot search history. Repositories search history but cannot launch fieldwork. This agent joins the two.

## 2. Boundaries
- Never launches a study or recruits a participant without approval.
- Never writes findings to a tracker without approval.
- Never states a finding without a cited source (study ID, clip, highlight, or URL).
- Never moves personal data between tools. Works with published insights and anonymised highlights only.
- Never claims statistical significance it has not calculated and shown.

## 3. What it touches
| Tool | Access | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| Search (web) | Read | Desk and market research |
| Condens MCP | Read | Published insights, reports, usability issues |
| Dovetail MCP | Read | Highlights, insights, tags across projects |
| Optimal Workshop MCP | Read | Tree tests, card sorts, surveys, cross-study synthesis |
| UserTesting MCP | Draft and launch after gate | Turn plan into tasks, create and launch test, read AI summary |
| Jira / Confluence | Write after gate | Insight pages, backlog items |

v1 primary connections: Optimal and Condens (most mature in UK agencies). UserTesting is in open beta — treat as optional.

## 4. When a human steps in
| Gate | Human sees | Decision |
|---|---|---|
| End of Discover | Evidence map: what we already know, with sources | Yes / revise |
| Research plan | Questions, method, sample, success criteria, ethics note | Approve |
| Before launch | Exact test draft, audience, cost if shown | Launch / hold |
| Before tracker write | Insight pack + proposed items | Yes / no |

## 5. How you know it is working
- Test set: three seeded repositories (synthetic but realistic) and five briefs, e.g. "What do we know about people abandoning the council tax reduction form?"
- Pass marks: every finding cited; no finding contradicted by a seeded source it ignored; plan matches method to question; zero launches without gate; PII never appears in output.
- Human review: a lead researcher grades synthesis quality 1–5. Release bar: 4.

## Components
`instructions.md` · skills: desk research, market research, repository search, study design, recruitment brief, qualitative synthesis, quantitative summary, insight reporting · `tools.md` · `manifest.md` · `guardrails.md` · `memory.md` (critical: research data) · `evals/`

## Hand-offs
Insight pack → UCD Pilot (Define) or Business Analyst (backlog).