SKILL.md
Message Test Designer
Designs the pre-scale message validation for a candidate narrative — the hypothesis, the target panel and recruit criteria, the comprehension / 5-second / message-market-fit (Wynter-style) protocols, the stimulus set drawn from the canon, the success thresholds, and the stop/revise decision rule. It sits in the Evaluate phase of the TALE loop and feeds the E sub-item the message is tested before scale (comprehension / 5-second / message-market-fit panel) — see tale-benchmark.md. Its output is a test design spec only: this skill designs the test, hands execution to the experiment builders, and never runs the panel, analyzes results, or adjudicates a claim. It also encodes the E1 discipline downstream — a message that fails its test triggers revision, not louder repetition (the narrative-whiplash guardrail's counter-move).
Scope guard: this skill produces the test design document only. It does not run the panel or the A/B experiment (hand execution to send-experiment-designer or ad-test-designer), analyze the returned results (use performance-analyzer), author or edit the message under test (message-system-architect owns the durable house), adjudicate any claim in the stimulus (unverifiable claims are marked [needs source] and submitted to memory/events/claims.ndjson via an authorized operation: propose request to registry-events.py — offer-claims-registry is the sole adjudicator), or compute the TALE profile result (only the narrative-quality-auditor gate scores TALE). It works one lever — test design — and hands off.
Quick Start
Design a message-market-fit panel test for [tagline / one-liner]. Target panel: [role / segment]. Variants: [list or "single"].
Design a 5-second comprehension test for our new homepage hero: "[headline + subhead]". What do we measure and what's the pass bar?
We have three positioning statements. Design the Wynter-style test that tells us which one lands before we scale spend.