Powering your organization’s home for research, at scale
At Dovetail, our mission is to enable the world to create better products and services through deep customer understanding. We believe that as organizations grow, a “customer understanding gap” develops between those exposed to customers regularly (like user researchers, product managers, designers, sales folks, frontline support, and more) and those who are not. We want to close this gap so that everybody in an organization has customer knowledge available at their fingertips. We believe this will enable faster, better decisions and drive empathy with customers, ultimately resulting in better products and services for the world.
We believe a vital part of this vision is changing how customer research findings are shared throughout an organization. In the past, access to research findings has been fragmented across roles, departments, and tools. It’s common for people to embark on arduous journeys to build the customer understanding that allows them to do their job effectively, whether that person is a product manager, a designer, an executive, or a marketing manager.
A repository for customer research helps solve this by centralizing data and insights into one collaborative, searchable, and secure data warehouse. It has to be flexible enough to work for various data types, methodologies, and organizational structures, while also integrating with other tools to weave the customer throughout the product development process.
To fulfill this vision, we’re introducing a host of new features on our Analysis + Repository and Enterprise plans that I’m excited to introduce to you today.
Stories are a new way to get your whole team involved in consuming insights. You can now create beautiful, engaging reports with evidence embedded directly within. Rather than create offline reports that are immediately stale, stories have an always-live, media-rich report experience. Embed highlights to watch videos directly from the story or click to view the raw data to gain more context.
Our new block editor makes it simple to organize your content to tell a compelling narrative. You can create multi-column layouts, drag and drop the content within layouts and add sticky notes to emphasize key points or takeaways. Headings and section dividers give you the ability to create a clear structure and group your insights. You can also add images from the Unsplash image library and some amazing illustrations created by our very own illustrator, Lisa!
You can also now instantly understand the impact of your research with read receipts which lets you see which teammates have viewed each of your stories.
As your team builds up your research repository over time, important themes often begin to emerge across projects that can go unnoticed. Stories make it simple to create cross-project reports on important themes. In minutes, build a story that dives into learnings of a specific persona, a feature set, or product usability concerns. Don’t let prior research live in silos or become shelf-ware that decays over time.
You can also take advantage of your team’s shared repository that has accumulated a wealth of knowledge over time and make it accessible to all. Any Dovetail user can create and share stories - even free viewers!
We believe the introduction of stories is an entirely new way of thinking about how research is disseminated inside an organization, and that it will help organizations close their customer understanding gap to innovate faster.
More customization features than ever before
With all of your colleagues visiting Dovetail to consume research in a self-service way, we think it’s important that your workspace is personalized to your organization. Our new customizable home feature lets admins control the new user landing experience for consumers—change the content and layout of the home to set context, provide usage instructions or link resources, introduce the research team, or drive visibility to important projects or particularly insightful findings.
Home also uses our new block editor, which means you can insert references to key projects or stories, create an activity feed with our new live search blocks feature; leave written instructions; and tailor the look and feel with layouts, images, text cards, tables, files, and more.
Admins can also set a custom theme for their workspace that applies your brand’s primary color throughout Dovetail, including in all buttons, tabs, and menus.
Pull in relevant files with our new Google Drive integration
Last year we released a Zoom integration to make it easy to import your Zoom recordings to Dovetail for transcription and analysis. Now, you can connect Google Drive to import Google Meet calls and other files. Alongside our Zapier integration for real-time ingestion of all kinds of data, it’s now easier than ever to build a centralized research repository with Dovetail.
We’ve also made some improvements to how files work in Dovetail workspaces—files now show up in global search, where you can preview certain files and filter results by type. Existing files that have been uploaded to the workspace can also be embedded in stories, so there’s no need to upload them again. Lastly, you can now bulk drag and drop multiple files into editors across Dovetail—whether that’s a note, insight, story, or home.
Connect Google Drive to Dovetail →
Track research participants in a privacy-conscious way
Earlier this year, we released People, allowing you to keep all your participant data in one place. You can create profiles for each research participant, then link a person to a note or insight. People enables a connection between the research you’re doing and the people involved, which makes demographic segmentation easier.
We’ve released three new features to make People even better:
Two new field types, single and multi-select, let you quickly capture structured data on a person to easily segment data during analysis and in search results.
You can now generate randomized custom profile pictures for your participants. This is just one of the many innovative features we’re building to make privacy in research fun.
Lastly, you can now add comments to a person. This is useful for keeping a record of when someone has last contacted a participant to avoid over-contacting them.
Enterprise-ready with single sign-on, SOC 2, and more
We take the privacy and security of your data seriously. Over the past few months, we’ve continued to invest in essential security features and organization processes like single sign-on (now with IdP-initiated login for Okta), remote session log out, and SOC 2 audit. We’ve also overhauled our security and privacy documentation in our help center and released a new master subscription agreement and privacy policy to simplify and clarify our language.
Lastly, we’ve grown our team to include full-time support and customer success to provide the highest level of service to our enterprise customers.
Learn more about our Enterprise plan →
