Dovetail in 2023: visualizing our versatile and efficient product

Placing customers at the heart of any organization is a huge challenge. While teams collect mountains of customer feedback (e.g. interviews, NPS surveys, sales calls, in-product feedback, app store reviews, usability testing), most are overwhelmed by analyzing it all efficiently. When insights emerge through arduous analysis, convincing stakeholders to take action remains a challenge. Moreover, stored insights are fragmented across cloud tools in disparate formats like structured survey responses, videos, or PDF presentations, making continuous learning difficult at best.

Our mission is to improve the quality of every thing. We believe that teams who listen to their users create higher quality things. To help teams address these challenges, we’re building a versatile product that enables efficient analysis of data from any source, in any format, empowering our customers to create more engaging insights that drive action.

2022

This year we released new features to help teams store, reference, and share files in Dovetail, including full-document search within files like presentations, white-papers, and research reports. We shipped five new ways to slice and dice data including a collaborative canvas for visual synthesis. We enhanced projects to support high volume data and more file types and customization, launched workspace analytics to measure stakeholder engagement, became HIPAA compliant for healthcare customers, released custom video data retention to drive compliance and participant privacy, and increased our transcription languages to 31 with the addition of Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin. In all, we delivered thousands of improvements to speed up Dovetail, fix issues, and make the platform more usable (see more of them at dovetailapp.com/changes). We also launched a digital magazine for product people; opened our San Francisco office, tripled our team to over 100 Dovetailers, and placed in the top 10 best places to work in Australia. In 2022, our customers uploaded over 22 years of video and audio, created 3 million notes, 11 million highlights, and over 600,000 research insights in Dovetail.

2023

Today, Dovetail helps thousands of teams develop better products for people to use, better experiences for users to engage with, and better services for the public to rely on—see some of our customers and read their stories at dovetailapp.com/customers.

Next year, we’ll continue to invest in making Dovetail versatile so you can house all research and feedback, efficient to reduce the time to insight, integrated with the tools you love, scalable for large teams, and connected to a community of like-minded professionals.

Supporting all research and feedback

Dovetail will be the source of truth for all customer insights, no matter the origin, research method, or format the data comes in. Imagine being able to tag PDFs, screenshots, photos, screen recordings, or multiple choice responses in structured surveys.

New features that enable analysis of all kinds of data will unlock efficient research for use cases beyond interviews and usability testing, into competitor analysis, market research, synthesis of support themes or product feedback, and even customer call analysis.

Whether you’re conducting interviews, building your insights hub, or collating competitor screenshots, Dovetail projects are flexible to support any workflow. Set up your project in a way that’s fit for purpose with a customizable sidebar, features you can toggle on and off, and built-in support for all kinds of data and file formats.

When you’re ready to share insights, Dovetail makes it easy to create engaging, delightful, and consumable outputs. New features in 2023 include editable highlight reels, automatic summarization, public links to specific highlights, improved invite flows and user onboarding, and integrations with collaboration tools like Notion and Jira.

Reducing time to insight

Making sense of unstructured data is arduous and time consuming. In 2023, we’re focused on driving efficiency with new AI features to cut the time it takes to go from source data to a sharable, summarized insight. Here’s a few examples of what you’ll be able to do with AI assistance.

Write research questions

Dovetail provides a useful starting point—imagine using a product plan template to document your learning goals, and Dovetail’s AI assistance automatically writes interview questions for you.

Summarize data

Once you’ve gathered your original data (e.g. by connecting Zendesk for support tickets, Zoom for video recordings, or Typeform for survey responses), automatic summarization makes it trivial to cut out noise and focus on the important takeaways.

Condense videos

Dovetail’s AI will shorten videos to skip the fluff and only include the important parts of the conversation. Easily navigate videos with automatic categorization into chapters, identifying when there’s a screen being shared, and sentiment analysis on video.

Suggest tags

Speed up your analysis of video, documents, images, or plain text with suggested tags based on your highlight. Simply select what’s important and Dovetail’s AI assistance recommends relevant existing tags from your tag boards, or suggests a new one.

Find themes

Synthesizing large amounts of unstructured data is a manual process. Even knowing where to start is overwhelming. In 2023, Dovetail’s AI assistance automatically clusters your highlights into themes, and can even create ready-to-share insights for you, complete with a title, description, and AI generated cover image.

Redact sensitive information

Finally, when you’re ready to share insights and highlights, choose to protect the privacy of your participants and redact PII while retaining the actual content—Dovetail’s AI can automatically detect and redact faces, names, and other personal information.

Integrate the tools you love

First-party integrations with point solutions like Maze mean there’s no need to reformat data to prepare it for analysis in Dovetail. Connect Dovetail to dozens of point solutions like usability testing, video calling, surveying, and support desk software, and surface insights where your team works with collaboration, roadmapping, and task tracking integrations.

Using something we don’t support? We’ve got you covered. Just use Dovetail’s powerful Zapier app, upload a CSV, or drop a folder of files into a project to upload them, convert them, and make them searchable.

A scalable, standardized insights hub

Experience the true benefit of a compounding, org-wide customer insights hub with a range of improvements to scale and standardize research.

New features like folders, saved searches, and three levels of permissions (at the workspace, folder, and project level) help you scale Dovetail to thousands of projects and users across your organization. Workspace tags, fields, saved searches, and custom project and insight templates drive standardization of process, taxonomy, and organization.

Improved workspace tags (formerly extensions) allow you to synthesize themes across projects, while automatically generated global insights help teams build a holistic understanding of the customer from data across the entire workspace—without any manual work.

Dovetail’s customizable branding, home, subdomain, and saved searches, allows you to curate the stakeholder experience, while deep search within video, documents, and text—along with AI assistance—allow stakeholders to self-service insights without bothering anyone. Simply write what you’re looking for and Dovetail returns results.

All of this is underpinned by world-class security and administration features like configurable user authentication, single sign-on, custom data retention policies, activity audit log, editor version history. Along with SOC 2, GDPR, and HIPAA readiness. In 2023, you can even choose whether your Dovetail data is stored in the US, Europe, or Australia.

The Dovetail community

We know there’s no one way to conduct research or make sense of customer feedback—everyone does it a little differently.

The Dovetail community contains thousands of templates created by people like you. Tag boards act as starter packs for a tag taxonomy—get started with a set of tags for your use case, from common symptoms in clinical trials to onboarding feedback for cloud products.

Project templates, insight templates, creative stickers, covers, and icons help you move faster and spruce up your research outputs. No matter your role, use case, or industry, there’s a template in the Dovetail community to kickstart your next research project.

In addition to templates, check out the Dovetail community for regular in-person events hosted all over the world. Find jobs, discuss best practices, share tips and tricks, and get support from over 6,000 people in our public Slack community workspace.

The future is bright

It’s an exciting time to be in research. With more organizations embracing the value of insight-driven decision-making, and trends towards the democratization of the research practice—there is a lot to look forward to as more and more people conduct and consume research as a part of their day-to-day work. In 2023, Dovetail is proud to be supporting this growing community. We’re excited to take this next step with you all and look forward to delivering our vision for the future of research.