How designers can do research with Dovetail

Designing exceptional experiences starts with understanding your users deeply. Before diving into ideation and prototyping, the first step is to arm yourself with insights through desk research. With Dovetail, you can uncover, explore, and synthesize knowledge effortlessly. Here’s how you can leverage Dovetail to elevate your design work with insights rooted in what matters most—your users.

1. Start with Magic Search to unearth existing knowledge

Why start from scratch when your organization already holds a wealth of knowledge? Dovetail’s Magic Search empowers you to explore insights from past research instantly. With just a question, Magic Search surfaces key findings from your organization’s data, saving you time and helping you build on existing work.

Whether you’re validating assumptions or discovering new angles, Magic Search analyzes and distills relevant insights, helping you focus on what’s most critical to your design challenge.

2. Use global search to ask targeted questions

When you have a specific question in mind, Global Search is your go-to tool. Simply enter a query, and Dovetail will surface relevant past research, insights, and themes in seconds. This feature is particularly useful for designers who need to get up to speed on what’s already been discovered about their users.

The automatic summary feature in global search is a game-changer. It distills complex information into easily digestible summaries, allowing you to identify key themes and trends quickly. These summaries act as a roadmap, guiding your design decisions and ensuring that your work is aligned with user needs.

3. Tap the power of Channels to get the full picture, fast

Want to understand what users are saying across every feedback touchpoint? With Channels, you can stream all your customer feedback—support tickets, app reviews, NPS responses, and more—into one centralized view.

Channels uses AI to automatically classify data into themes for you to quickly understand high level trends. You can use advanced segmentation and filters to slice and dice as well, making it easy to find the insights and trends that matter to you.

4. Create insights from research summaries

As you gather information during your desk research, Dovetail allows you to create insights directly from research summaries. These insights can initially live in your personal profile, but they don’t have to stay there. As you move forward with your design process, you can transfer these insights into your project workspace.

This seamless transition from personal research to project foundation ensures that your design work is informed by real, validated insights. By incorporating existing knowledge into your project, you can avoid redundant efforts and focus on exploring areas that truly need attention.

5. Share your findings with the team

Desk research is not just about gathering information; it’s also about sharing what you’ve learned with your team. Dovetail makes this easy by allowing you to create and share insights in a format that’s accessible to everyone involved in the project.

You can present your insights in team meetings using Dovetail’s present mode, or share them more broadly by enabling public access. Additionally, you can map your insights to relevant projects in tools like Slack, Productboard, and Jira, ensuring that your findings are integrated into your team’s workflows. This collaborative approach helps to ensure that everyone is on the same page and that your design efforts are aligned with the broader goals of the organization.

6. Continuously update and refine your research

Desk research is not a one-time task; it’s an ongoing process. As you continue to work on your project, keep revisiting the research and updating your insights. Dovetail allows you to refine your research findings and adapt them as new information becomes available.

By continuously updating your research, you can ensure that your designs remain relevant and responsive to evolving user needs. This iterative approach helps to keep your work grounded in the latest insights and ensures that your designs are always aligned with the real needs of your users.

A powerful and easy way to inform your designs

Conducting desk research in Dovetail is a powerful way to ensure that your design work is informed by solid insights. By leveraging tools like Magic Search, global search, and the ability to create and share insights, you can build a strong foundation for your design process. This approach not only saves time and resources but also ensures that your designs are rooted in a deep understanding of your users. So, before you dive into your next project, take some time to explore what your company already knows—it could make all the difference.