Dovetail

is a user research and insights platform designed to help teams analyze qualitative data, collaborate, and generate insights from research studies, interviews, and user feedback. Its core purpose is to simplify the process of collecting, organizing, analyzing, and sharing research insights, particularly for HCD researchers, product managers, designers, and policy teams.

Value Proposition

• Streamlined Qualitative Research: Dovetail reduces the time and effort involved in qualitative research by centralizing data collection, transcription, analysis, and reporting into one platform. This leads to faster and more efficient workflows, from user interviews to presenting research insights.
• Insight Generation: With features like thematic analysis, tagging, and data visualization, Dovetail helps teams generate actionable insights from raw qualitative data, making it easier to identify user needs, preferences, and pain points. This is critical for HCD, product, and policy teams that need to make informed decisions based on user feedback.
• Collaboration Across Teams: By providing a shared workspace, Dovetail enables collaboration between different stakeholders (researchers, designers, product managers, etc.), ensuring everyone is aligned on the research findings. This fosters a shared understanding of the data and encourages data-driven decision-making across the organization.
• Effective Communication of Insights: Dovetail’s reporting features and shareable insights boards help teams present research findings in a clear and impactful way. This ensures that the research has a wider influence on decision-making, especially when presenting findings to leadership or external stakeholders.
• Flexible and Scalable: The tool is flexible enough to accommodate both small research studies and large-scale, ongoing projects. As research scales, Dovetail provides a structured way to organize and analyze growing volumes of qualitative data.

Target Users

HCD Research: Dovetail is highly valuable for HCD researchers conducting user interviews, usability tests, and surveys. It simplifies the process of deriving insights from qualitative data and presenting them to design and product teams. These users will receive priority consideration for available licenses.

Secondary Users

• Product Development: Product managers, non-reasearchers on an HCD team, and other teams can use Dovetail to gather user feedback and analyze it for feature prioritization, user satisfaction, and pain points.
• Policy Research: Policy teams can collect qualitative data from customer interviews or surveys and analyze the data to inform policy implementation strategies, services design, or customer personas.

Requesting Dovetail Access

Step 1: Submit a license request using the CCSQ Dovetail License Request Form. Researchers supporting Application Development Organizations (ADOs) will receive priority consideration for available licenses.

Step 2: The CCSQ Dovetail team reviews and approves/denies the user role request. You will be notified via email that your request has been submitted, and again when your role has been approved or denied.

Step 3: The CCSQ Dovetail team will provide resources for getting started.

Step 4: Log into Dovetail https://ccsq-qualitynet.dovetail.com/home using your assigned credentials and bookmark the page. 

Data Collection and Organization

• Media Uploads: Dovetail allows users to upload interview recordings, videos, transcripts, notes, and survey results. It supports various formats like video, audio, and text.
• Automated Transcription: It offers automated transcription of interviews and audio files, making it easier to extract key information from conversations.
• Tagging: Users can tag data points within transcripts, notes, or files to categorize key themes, ideas, or observations. This tagging helps organize data into themes that can later be analyzed and visualized.

Analysis and Insights

• Thematic Analysis: By tagging and categorizing insights, teams can organize research findings into themes or patterns. This helps identify common trends, behaviors, and pain points among users.
• Highlighting and Summarizing: Users can highlight key quotes or parts of interviews and create summaries for easy reference, ensuring important information is quickly accessible.
• Data Visualization: Dovetail offers basic visualizations to showcase patterns and trends across research projects. For instance, users can create affinity diagrams or cluster insights based on tags or themes.
• Insights Board: This feature allows researchers to group related findings and present them in a shareable format, which is particularly useful when communicating findings with stakeholders.

Collaboration

• Shared Workspaces: Teams can work together on research projects, with shared access to data, annotations, and insights. Multiple team members can collaborate on tagging and organizing information in real-time.
• Comments and Feedback: Team members can leave comments on specific parts of a transcript or data file, enabling feedback and discussion on insights or findings.
• Live Collaboration: Dovetail supports live editing and collaboration, allowing researchers to work together on the same project simultaneously.

Reporting and Sharing

• Export Options: Users can export reports, insights, or raw data in various formats, including text, CSV, or visual formats. This is useful for sharing research findings with external stakeholders or for archival purposes.
• Shareable Dashboards: The platform allows users to create shareable dashboards or reports, which can be sent to non-Dovetail users such as executives or product teams. These dashboards provide an overview of key research findings and insights.
• Linking Insights: You can link different pieces of data such as quotes, images, or themes, across research projects, helping teams connect the dots between multiple studies.

Integration

External Tool Integration: Dovetail integrates with tools like Slack, Jira, and Google Drive, making it easier to collaborate across different team workflows. You can push research insights into project management tools or share findings within communication channels.

Security and Compliance

Data Security: Dovetail ensures secure storage of data with encryption and compliance with data protection regulations such as GDPR, making it suitable for research teams handling sensitive user data. To learn more, please visit the Dovetail Trust Center.