Summarize your high-level findings as insights

The word 'insight' has a variety of different definitions. In Dovetail, an insight is a specific object type where you summarize and share high-level project findings in a simple format.

Insights are a flexible way for you to present high-level findings from common themes and trace important quotes back to their original source. In this lesson, we will cover two common types of insights you can create in a project – an atomic finding or a formal research report.

The most common type of insight created in Dovetail is an atomic insight. Often referred to as a "nugget", an atomic finding represents a single, high-level finding from a project. This type of insight is useful for bringing together related pieces of evidence that contribute to any critical discoveries that require immediate attention or action.

These could look like –

• A discovery about human behavior and the underlying motivations behind that behavior.

• Information that challenges what we believe about users and how they exist in the world.

• Knowledge that uncovers fundamental principles that drive us towards seeing users in a new way.

There are a few key pros and cons to creating insights that represent atomic findings from a project.

If you decide to create insights as atomic findings, here are a few tips we recommend:

• Contextualize – Encourage teams to provide context when sharing single-finding insights. This can include background information, related findings, or how the insight fits into the larger picture of the project or organization.

• Link to broader goals – Help teams understand how single findings connect to broader organizational objectives or customer needs. This can foster a more strategic approach to decision-making.

• Encourage collaboration – Promote discussions around single findings in team meetings or workshops to explore their implications and potential actions collaboratively. This can help mitigate the risks of oversimplification and cherry-picking.

The second most common insight is a research report. This typically is an in-depth summary of a single project with a collection of findings.

There are a few key pros and cons to creating insights that represent a research report of a project in Dovetail.