How designers can do research with Dovetail

Designing exceptional experiences starts with understanding your users deeply. But before diving into ideation and prototyping, you often start with desk research—a valuable way to gather crucial information without needing to conduct primary research yourself (such as user interviews or usability testing). With Dovetail, you can uncover, explore, and synthesize knowledge effortlessly. Here’s how you can leverage Dovetail to elevate your design work with insights rooted in what matters most—your users.

1. Start with magic search to unearth existing knowledge

Why start from scratch when your organization already holds a wealth of knowledge? Dovetail’s magic search empowers you to explore insights from past research instantly. With just a question, magic search surfaces key findings from your organization’s data, saving you time and helping you build on existing work.

Whether you’re validating assumptions or discovering new angles, magic search analyzes and distills relevant insights, helping you focus on what’s most critical to your design challenge.

2. Tap the power of Channels to get the full picture, fast

Want to understand what users are saying across every feedback touchpoint? With Channels, you can stream all your customer feedback—support tickets, app reviews, NPS responses, and more—into one centralized view.

Channels uses AI to automatically classify data into themes for you to quickly understand high level trends. You can use advanced segmentation and filters to slice and dice as well, making it easy to find the insights and trends that matter to you.

3. Create new insights from past research

As you gather information during your desk research, Dovetail allows you to create new insights directly from past research summaries. You can create insights from a magic search summary, and look through other past research projects and add those insights into a new one.

Then, instead of reinventing the wheel, you can avoid redundant efforts and fuel your roadmap with everything your organization already knows about your customer. The more research that exists in Dovetail, the smarter your team can be about what to work on next.

4. Share your findings with the team

Desk research is not just about gathering information; it’s also about sharing what you’ve learned with your team. Dovetail makes this easy by allowing you to create and share insights in a format that’s accessible to everyone involved in the project.

You can present your insights in team meetings using Dovetail’s present mode, or share them more broadly by enabling public access. Additionally, you can map your insights to relevant projects in tools like Slack, Productboard, and Jira, ensuring that your findings are integrated into your team’s workflows. This collaborative approach helps to ensure that everyone is on the same page and that your design efforts are aligned with the broader goals of the organization.

5. Continuously update and refine your research

Desk research is not a one-time task; it’s an ongoing process. As you continue to work on your project, keep revisiting the research and updating your insights. Dovetail allows you to refine your research findings and adapt them as new information becomes available.

By continuously updating your research, you can ensure that your designs remain relevant and responsive to evolving user needs. This iterative approach helps to keep your work grounded in the latest insights and ensures that your designs are always aligned with the real needs of your users.

A powerful and easy way to inform your designs

Conducting desk research in Dovetail is a powerful way to ensure that your design work is informed by solid insights. By leveraging tools like magic search, Channels, and the ability to create and share insights, you can build a strong foundation for your design process. This approach not only saves time and resources but also ensures that your designs are grounded in a deep understanding of your users. So, before you dive into your next project, take some time to explore what your company already knows—it could make all the difference.