Setting up a project

Projects are where you organize your data in Dovetail and transform research into insights. They are a database that contain your related notes, tags, highlights, and insights.

Depending on the type of data you have and how you work, a single project could represent many things. For example, a project could contain:

• Customer interviews – each note is a single interview.

• Usability testing sessions – each note is a recording and transcript from a session.

• User feedback – each note is a piece of feedback from a user.

• Survey responses – each note is an individual response.

• Multiple research methods – each group is a method.

To create a new project, navigate to the Projects page. From the Create Project button, you can start a blank project or copy one of our community templates.

At the top of your sidebar, you’ll see the project title. Click on the down arrow to reveal a dropdown with several features and menu options. Here’s an overview of each.

• Project name and icon: Rename your project by editing the text in this field. You can also swap the icon associated with your project.

• Follow: Receive and manage notifications about new insights, or comments in the project.

• Settings: Navigate and manage your project information, access, and trash, as well as options to export your data, convert the project to a template, and archive or delete the project.

• Shown in the sidebar: Every project has a readme, notes, highlights, tags, insights, and charts. Clicking the 👁️ on the right of each of these items will hide or show it in the project sidebar. Re-order your sidebar by using the ⋮⋮ icon to drag items up or down.

Projects contain 6 objects, all accessible via the sidebar:

• Readme - This is the first thing new visitors will see when they open your project. It’s a great place to describe your project for others, set the background for your research, and provide additional context including goals, hypotheses or assumptions, research plan, timeline and project status.

• Notes - Notes live within projects and house your data - text, images, audio, video, etc.

• Highlights - Highlights live on notes and are used to surface quotes and sections of text that are meaningful.

• Tags - Tags are used to categorize highlights into common themes.

• Insights - Insights live within projects and are where you summarize findings from your project and across other projects.

• Charts - Charts live within projects and help you visualize patterns surfaced in your highlights and tags.