Up close and personal with new Dove-atars

At Dovetail, we run a quarterly hackathon called Make It. It runs over two days and allows us to innovate on projects we’re passionate about and collaborate with new teammates. You can read about the first one we ever ran in this article.

This Make It, one of the teams decided to focus on improving avatars. No, not the highest-grossing film of all time, but the profile pictures you see scattered throughout Dovetail. We were stunned to learn that less than 13 percent of our users had uploaded a profile picture, and even a smaller number have assigned profile pictures to their research participants tracked in the People tab. Meaning that right now, your workspace might be looking a little dull and grey 😬

Not to worry, here at Dovetail, we love finding opportunities to impress and delight our customers. A cross-functional team of engineering, design, and marketing set out to:

• Protect the privacy of your participants by allocating randomly generated profile pictures.

• Make sure your workspace looks more colorful and enticing for you and your teammates.

• Empower you to add personality to your profile and elevate the people analyzing and collaborating in your workspace.

• Enable you to easily differentiate between participants when you’re scrolling through your transcripts.

Enter Dove-atar

Before we went and executed anything, we huddled to cover off our use cases. We identified two use cases and considered what people should be able to change as part of their Dove-atar:

• Users. Dove-atar for the individual using Dovetail.

• People. Dove-atar for the participants that you are tracking and managing in People.

Users

For the individual who is active in Dovetail. Your picture appears on your profile, when you are viewing, next to projects you are working on, and when commenting on something. A personalized profile picture enables your work to be more identifiable. For this experience, you should be able to pick some personalized elements like hair and clothes in an array of customizable colors. Jump into profile settings to build yours today.

People

In January, we launched People, a way to track and manage your research participants. Due to privacy requirements, many users don’t upload profile photos of their participants. Our new profile picture builder is a creative, fun solution to this problem. But we figured that you probably wouldn’t want to build custom profile pictures for all of your research participants, so we built the functionality to randomly generate profile pictures in bulk. This was an exciting challenge because we needed to make profile pictures that didn’t assume anything about the person they portrayed and would work well for all people. Every time you add or import a person, a randdom profile picture will be automatically generated.

There’s no guarantee we got it 100 percent right on the first pass, but thankfully it’s something we can build on easily, so please hit us up with any suggestions!

Cheers, The Dove-atar team