Creating an Analysis

An analysis is the central workspace in Hinsley. Every piece of research, every decomposition, every scenario, and every forecasting workflow lives inside an analysis. The research question you start from shapes everything that follows - the research Hinsley gathers, the context the AI assistant works from, and the framing of every downstream output.

Every new analysis begins as a draft. From the draft you can either refine the question with Hinsley before research starts, or start research straight away.

Starting a New Analysis

The Hinsley home page asks “What is your research question?” Enter the question you want to analyze. It can be up to 1,000 characters. For guidance on writing a question that produces useful results, see Start With the Right Question.

Below the question, the collapsed “Provide additional context for your question” section holds five optional fields. You can fill them in here, or later on the draft page:

Purpose or decision - The decision or action the analysis supports.
Audience - Who will read or act on the finished analysis.
In scope - The regions, sectors, or actors the research should cover.
Out of scope - Anything the research should leave out.
Time period - The period the research should cover, such as the next 18 months or 1990 to 2000.

Each context field holds up to 5,000 characters. The form then offers two ways forward:

Validate my question - Saves a draft, opens the draft page, and starts an assessment of the question. This is the default button, so pressing Enter in the question field selects it.
Skip validation & start research - Saves the draft and immediately starts research on the question as written, with no assessment. You land on the new analysis.

If you are not sure where to start, the home page also offers example research questions you can use as a starting point. Until you have an analysis of your own, the examples are listed below the form; after that, an “Example Research Questions” link opens them.

Refining a Draft

“Validate my question” opens the draft page. It has two panels: a chat titled “Refine your analysis topic with Hinsley” and an editable form titled “Current draft”. On a narrow screen the two panels stack.

The Current Draft Form

The form holds the research question and, under “Optional context”, the five context fields described above. Edits save when you leave a field, and before you send a chat message, re-assess, or start research. If the same draft was changed in another browser tab, Hinsley shows the saved wording beside yours and asks you to choose between “Save my wording” and “Use saved wording”.

“View Draft History” lists earlier versions of the draft. Each save records the wording it replaced, labelled “Your edit” or “Applied suggestion”. The history keeps the 25 most recent versions.

The Question Assessment

When the draft page opens, Hinsley reviews the question and posts a “Question assessment” in the chat. The assessment grades the draft against six criteria:

Serves a decision or reader - Answering the question would change what someone understands or does.
A right-sized question - The draft reads as a research question rather than a bare subject label, and is specific enough to give research a direction without narrowing to a single forecasting question.
Names who, where, and when - The actors, the place or domain, and the time period are identifiable. A past period counts.
Does not assume its own answer - The wording is neutral about the outcome.
The answer is not already settled - Informed people could reasonably reach different answers.
Evidence plausibly exists - The question is framed so that evidence for it could exist. This is a judgement on the framing only; no sources have been searched yet.

Each criterion receives one of three ratings:

Strong - The draft meets the criterion.
Worth sharpening - The draft could be improved on this point. A one-sentence comment explains why.
Not applicable to this draft - The criterion does not apply to this question.

The assessment has no overall score. Its header counts the criteria worth sharpening as potential improvements. A criterion marked “Needs your input” has a question for you, and its “Answer” button starts a chat reply to it. Other criteria worth sharpening offer “Suggest improvements”, which asks Hinsley to propose a change to the draft.

The assessment card also links to “What makes a strong analysis question?”, a guide that explains each criterion in more depth.

Chatting With Hinsley

Use the chat to discuss the question with Hinsley, answer its questions, or ask for alternative wording. When Hinsley suggests an edit, it appears as a “Proposed change” card showing the current and proposed wording for each affected field. Hinsley does not edit the draft itself:

Apply or Apply all copies the proposed wording into the form.
Dismiss declines the change, with an optional reason that Hinsley sees.

A proposal is marked “Out of date” once the field it changes no longer holds the wording it was proposed against, whether you edited the field yourself or applied another proposal to it. A newer proposal does not replace an earlier one; both stay pending until you apply or dismiss them.

Re-assessing

Once the draft changes, the assessment header shows “Latest draft not yet assessed”. Click “Re-assess current draft” below the form to grade the new wording. The button is disabled until the draft differs from the version last assessed. Earlier assessments stay in the chat, collapsed as “Earlier assessment”. Any proposal still pending from an earlier assessment is marked “Superseded”, because the new assessment grades the draft afresh.

Starting Research

“Start research” below the form turns the draft into a full analysis. It is available whatever the assessment says; criteria marked “Worth sharpening” do not block it. When the latest assessment is current and has no potential improvements, a second “Start research” button also appears inside the assessment.

The analysis topic is the draft’s research question. The five context fields carry over to the analysis, where they inform its research, and you can edit them later from the analysis settings. After research starts, the draft page becomes read-only and shows an “Open analysis” button.

Draft Analyses

The home page has two tabs:

Your Analyses - Your existing analyses.
Draft Analyses - Your drafts that have not started research yet, most recently edited first, with the date each was created and last edited.

Click a draft’s name to reopen it and continue where you left off. A draft is private to the person who created it. Other members of the account, including account admins, cannot see it. Once research starts, the draft leaves the Draft Analyses tab.

What Happens Next

When research starts, by either path, Hinsley does several things in sequence:

Creates the analysis and redirects you to its home page.
Starts an initial research workflow that searches the web and news sources for relevant content, fetches and assesses each result, and generates a research brief.
Opens an analysis chat conversation dedicated to this analysis. The chat becomes available for messaging once the initial research completes.

A progress timeline on the analysis page shows the current research step. If you navigate away while research is running, Hinsley sends you an email when it finishes.

Account Limits

Every Hinsley plan sets two per-user limits that affect analysis creation:

Analyses created per month - How many new analyses each user can create in a rolling month. Drafts that have not started research do not count.
Active analyses per user - How many of a user’s analyses can be active at once. Deactivating an older analysis frees a slot.

If you hit either limit, the form on the home page is replaced with a notice explaining which limit was reached and how to upgrade your plan. The limits are checked again when you click “Start research” on a draft. Your existing analyses remain fully accessible.

After Creation

Once the initial research completes, a typical next step is to explore the research brief, then either begin the analysis chat to develop your thinking, build a decomposition of the topic, or create scenarios and forecasting questions. You can also invite collaborators at any time.

Hinsley Documentation