Dovetail helps Canva empower the world to design, one customer insight at a time
Even successful products like Canva need generative customer intelligence to unlock new opportunities. With the goal of "empowering the world to design," Canva designers and product teams prioritize projects based on company strategy and knowledge gaps. They plan, conduct, and analyze customer intelligence, sharing their findings and recommendations to improve user experience. Although customer obsession and product experience reviews have always been integral to Canva, their dedicated Design Research team, led by Becky White since early 2020, is a newer addition. Before this team, designers and PMs conducted ad-hoc customer intelligence, making it difficult to track past insights, which new team members often discovered only through word-of-mouth.
4,000+
team members around the globe
100+
hours of customer data analyzed
20+
design researchers and beyond connecting through Dovetail
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Design research at Canva
Even successful products like Canva need generative customer intelligence to unlock new opportunities. With the goal of "empowering the world to design," Canva designers and product teams prioritize projects based on company strategy and knowledge gaps. They plan, conduct, and analyze customer intelligence, sharing their findings and recommendations to improve user experience. Although customer obsession and product experience reviews have always been integral to Canva, their dedicated Design Research team, led by Becky White since early 2020, is a newer addition. Before this team, designers and PMs conducted ad-hoc customer intelligence, making it difficult to track past insights, which new team members often discovered only through word-of-mouth.
Person with earbuds working on laptop in cozy café with brown leather seating and natural light.
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Canva's customer intelligence platform
Canva's adoption of Dovetail was driven by the need for a central customer intelligence platform, which Becky was among the first to set up. Professionals and product team members now use Dovetail to store moderated session recordings and transcripts, enabling quick transcriptions, tagging of data, identification of emerging themes, and data analysis. This platform allows both new and existing Canva team members to easily access previous projects or topics of interest by re-watching full sessions or searching for specific terms.
With Dovetail, product managers can review user quotes on topics like creativity and collaboration, while new designers can watch sessions to identify user struggles with existing flows. Content designers also benefit by quickly understanding user sentiment around messaging and copy. This accessibility allows anyone at Canva to conduct intelligence independently, which is essential for a global, fast-paced team.
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The power of video
According to Becky, her team finds video clips extremely powerful when presenting their findings; far more effective than reading a quote.
Videos are so loved in the Canva product team that the professionals often won’t wait until the final report to share great video clips. If the product team wasn’t able to observe the session, they send a Dovetail link to the clip via Slack. This enables everyone to get on the same page and have a great discussion about the product implications and opportunities in real-time.
Two people collaborating at a table with laptop and notebook, green plant with red berries in background.
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Enabling a customer-led culture
Becky and her team are excited to nurture a customer-led culture at Canva, but they can’t conduct all the customer intelligence themselves since they’re still a small team. So, part of their role at Canva is empowering other teams to get close to their customers. They hold office hours, have created templates and guides, and conduct training on customer intelligence best practices. Whenever designers and product managers conduct interviews, the customer intelligence team recommends using Dovetail to host all of their customer data. They are then able to upload, analyze data, and identify prominent themes before reporting.
Breaking quotes and observations down into this level of granularity, then re-combining them to identify themes is something anyone at Canva can do. Meaning, they can quickly get insights or dive team to see the full picture of their customer data to make smarter product decisions.
