Clients sometimes arrive with a console export and ask us to “make sense of it.” We can read an export. We will not let it set the shape of the brief. An export does not know that the long session on Tuesday was a child playing with the light presets while a parent cooked. The household told us that on a call. The export still shows a proud spike.
Our briefs open with the rooms. Bathroom, spare bedroom, a corner of a shoplot converted into a gym. Then the hours. Then the people, under the names they agreed to — often role names, not legal names. Only then do we mention a count, and only if the count would change a decision. “Four of seven households handed the phone to a relative during pairing” is a count we will print. “Average session length 6.2 minutes” is a count we usually leave out, because it mixes glances with programmes and makes the next meeting argue about a decimal.
We write in English for the walkthrough in Suite 1501–1502. If the sessions were in Bahasa Malaysia, the quoted sentences stay in Bahasa Malaysia, with a plain translation beneath. Polishing those quotes into fluent English would make the product team feel better and the next screen worse.
A product-cycle engagement brief is the shorter form of this habit, used when you already have recordings. A full companion-app study is the longer form, with new households. In both cases the artefact is paper-shaped: twelve to sixteen pages, or eight to ten, with a margin wide enough to write in. If you need slides, your designer can make them. We will not spend the last two days of a study decorating a deck.
If that sounds slower than a live dashboard, it is. People at a mirror are slower than a dashboard as well. The brief is meant to match them.