Questions to ask your insights hub, design edition

In a recent blog post, we shared some questions that you can ask your insights hub to help you uncover customer insights quickly, unblock your team, and springboard your next big product idea. These questions are a great starting point for anyone in your team wanting to get quick insights into your customer needs and make better decisions.

As a product designer, you know that getting into the minds of your customers is what helps you do your best work. You also know that asking the right questions is the first step to making decisions that customers will love. Whether you’re wanting to uncover feedback on designs, understand trends across certain features, or get a quick overview of your users' top requests, Dovetail’s AI-powered magic search can help you get to the bottom of all of those unique and nuanced questions that can help you build more impactful, user-centered designs.

By using a global semantic search, advanced filtering, and AI-driven summaries, magic search transforms your customer data (such as sales call transcripts, support tickets, usability tests, and more) into clear, actionable insights, all while saving time and improving decision-making. But what does this mean for you, as a designer looking to build better product experiences? It means you can quickly get to the heart of user needs, behaviors, and trends that will shape your next big design move.

In this post, we explore how magic search can help you find deeper insights and answer crucial questions for your design process. Here are five questions across various stages of your design process that you, as a designer, can ask your insights hub to improve your product experiences.

Pinpoint Jobs to Be Done

One of the biggest challenges in product design is understanding the core jobs that your users want to accomplish with your product. However, your users are humans, and humans don’t always behave in predictable ways. They may use your product in creative, unexpected, or even unintended ways. This "noise" can obscure the signal—the foundational workflows or tasks that your product is designed to help users complete.

Magic search helps you cut through this noise by identifying the key "jobs to be done" (JTBD) within your user data. By searching semantically—understanding the meaning of words and context rather than just literal keywords—you can discover exactly what users are trying to achieve when they use your product.

For example, you might ask: “What do [persona type or job title] want to accomplish when they use [product or feature name]?”

This question allows you to focus on what truly matters—understanding the core tasks or goals your product needs to support. With magic search, you can get to the heart of these jobs quickly, even across large volumes of feedback and user data, and use that information to refine your product’s functionality and design.

Get immediate feedback on designs

As a designer, you’re always in the loop of developing new features or tweaking existing ones. You need immediate, real-time feedback from your users to know whether you’re on the right track—or if there are issues that need to be addressed.

Magic search can provide that instant pulse check. Let’s say you’ve just released a new feature and you’re wondering how users are responding to it. You can simply ask your insights hub: “How are users responding to [product or feature name]?”

Magic search will scan through all your user feedback, surfacing positive or negative responses, and highlighting key trends or sentiments. This is invaluable for quickly celebrating wins—when your new feature is resonating well with users—and for spotting problems early on, so you can course-correct before issues become widespread.

Stay on top of trends

In product design, it’s not enough to just respond to customer feedback as it comes in. You also need to stay proactive and anticipate changes in user needs and behaviors over time. This is where trend spotting becomes critical.

Magic search makes it easy to stay on top of emerging trends by helping you uncover shifts in user behavior or sentiment. For example, you might ask: “How are users’ needs around [product or feature name] changing over time?”

Magic search will pull in feedback from a variety of sources—such as support tickets, app store reviews, and social media posts—so you can track how users' needs evolve and what gaps are emerging. This helps you anticipate future needs and adjust your design roadmap accordingly. If you have Channels as part of your Dovetail plan, you can dig even deeper into specific feedback sources, offering a clearer picture of how user sentiments are shifting.

Prioritize your design roadmap

As a designer, you’re always balancing multiple priorities, deciding which features or improvements to work on next. One of the best ways to prioritize is to listen to what users are explicitly asking for. However, this can be a challenge when feedback is scattered across different platforms. It’s easy to miss key requests or overlook common issues.

With magic search, you can pull all of this scattered feedback into one centralized hub and make sense of it quickly. By asking questions like: “What new experiences are users asking for the most?” you can instantly access a clear overview of your users' top requests.

This feedback can then guide your design decisions, helping you focus on the features or improvements that will have the biggest impact. Whether it’s fixing pain points or adding new functionalities, magic search ensures that your design efforts align with the most pressing needs of your users.

Build customer empathy through continuous discovery

The most successful designers understand that building empathy with users isn’t a one-time exercise—it’s an ongoing process. Continuously gathering and reflecting on user feedback is key to staying connected to your customers and ensuring that your designs remain relevant over time.

Magic search supports this habit of continuous discovery by making it easy to stay up to date with new insights. For example, you might ask: “What is recent user feedback on [product or feature name]?” Magic search will surface the most relevant insights across a variety of data sources, giving you a snapshot of how users are currently interacting with your product.

If you’re using Slack or Teams, you can even set up a recurring digest with Ask Dovetail. This will proactively deliver fresh insights directly to you, so you never miss an important piece of feedback and can stay informed without having to search manually.

Dovetail turns complex user feedback into simple, actionable insights. Whether you’re working on an incremental update or a major redesign, using magic search can help ensure that your product evolves in ways that truly meet the needs and desires of your users.

Start leveraging the power of magic search today. Build better product experiences that are backed by the voice of your customers. Try Dovetail today.