The Honeycomb Works supercharges development and innovation with Dovetail

At The Honeycomb Works, they’re on a mission for everyone at work to feel like they belong and are free to invent. They work with organizations to build cultures of inclusion, diversity, and innovation. They provide consultancy services, training, and events, but their core focus is their Honeycomb platform which is both an impact measurement tool and supports people to develop new positive habits based on the science of behavior change. User research is the core of what they do and how they create impact as the team constantly strives to gain a deep understanding of people, their behaviors, actions, thoughts, needs, and challenges.

The UX and research team work in an agile development cycle with lots of iterative learning and experimentation with qualitative research—academic research, usability testing, and user interviews—at the forefront.

Transcription for all accents—80% accurate, 30% faster

Honeycomb conducts research across a diverse set of users to understand how to build cultures of belonging and inclusion. The previously used transcription tool was costly and inaccurate, especially when trying to parse different accents of customers whose first language was not English. This creates more work for the team, who regularly have to go back and listen to the audio, edit, and correct errors in the script. When a big project came up, the team realized it was time to switch to a more effective and cost-efficient transcription solution.

Dovetail transcription was precise—even with accents—and affordable. It cut down process time by a third with ninety-seven percent accurate transcription for the team to start their analysis from. Dovetail's custom vocabulary allowed keywords used in the project to be defined, helping transcription become even more accurate. The team now confidently transcribes using Dovetail, knowing only small details will need to be fixed.

Say goodbye to silos with a transparent and collaborative tool

Research across separate tools at Honeycomb created challenges in keeping stakeholders aligned and teams from working in silos. When a project started, responsibilities were delegated to individual product team members: setting the hypothesis, defining the taxonomy, running interviews, tagging, writing notes, and generating shareable insights. This process worked the team was still small. But as the maturity of UX grew, they needed a tool to foster a stronger culture of collaboration across their body of research.

Adopting Dovetail aligned with Honeycomb's new direction in elevating how their teams build knowledge collectively. With a centralized structured tool, the research process was transparent and allowed for flexible, real-time, and remote collaboration. It was easy to bring people into the platform with an intuitive user experience and a short learning curve. Across projects, teams can now refine tags and taxonomies as they go to identify more patterns and trends. Teams can work on projects together—adding notes, comments, and affinity mapping at the same time — which helps keep stakeholders aligned. Now, when thinking about solutions, the team starts with the research to drive product direction.

Better decision-making with a simple, efficient, and reliable end-to-end research process

Research has always been a worthwhile, albeit time-consuming, investment at Honeycomb. The company is constantly striving to design a more intuitive, impactful, and user-centered product. However, the workload from analyzing qualitative data could be overwhelming at times, and the tools they were using didn't make it easier. It was very manual and inefficient to move data from audio, video recordings, and transcripts to Miro or sticky notes on walls, before eventually sharing reports out. Data would sometimes get lost along the way.

Dovetail was easy to use, sped up the research, and helped the team more accurately and holistically understand the data. By bringing the process into one place, they were able to reduce manual labor and switching pains between tools when synthesizing and never lose data again. Dovetail was extremely visual and end-to-end—from transcribing, tagging, and affinity mapping, to presenting the insights—creating a richer experience for consolidating more data, faster. With Dovetail's workflow structure, it's very clear whether a goal or objective is hit from a business perspective, and the team has more confidence that the research findings are accurate.