Dovetail Reviews

Dovetail really makes analysis and sharing insights easy

Comments: I love Dovetail for our research analysis and repository tool. We're always identifying new ways to leverage the tool for research needs. Dovetail is also really receptive to feedback, constantly improving, and doing research on the researchers.

Pros:

I LOVE that you are able to have a robust tool that includes analysis capabilities and houses insights from research. This gives stakeholders the ability to search all insights and view things like reading a medium article and also search historical insights. It also speeds up analysis with filtering options and highlights to filter down to key information to support an insight / finding.

Cons:

I would like to be able to track dates of when insights were created (not just when published in feed) so we can track age as well as somehow track the impact of the insight (e.g., what was done from it), to make reporting on research value easier.

From Feedback Chaos to Clarity with Dovetail

Comments: Dovetail has proven to be an essential tool for Catarse as we navigate a complete redesign and evolution of our crowdfunding platform. With a vast amount of user feedback coming in, organizing and prioritizing it could have been a daunting task. Thanks to Dovetail, we’ve been able to stay focused on what matters, ensuring we prioritize the most impactful changes. It’s been an incredible asset to our process.

Pros:

We’ve been using Dovetail to collect, organize, and analyze all our user interviews. Previously, managing interviews and feedback was time-consuming, but now we just upload the video, and Dovetail handles the transcription. Its AI-powered features help us quickly understand key feedback points. Recently, we connected Dovetail directly to our Zendesk, giving us real-time insights and streamlining the process even further.

Cons:

Honestly, we don’t have anything we dislike about Dovetail. If we had to complain about something, it’s that we wish we had discovered it sooner! It’s made such a positive impact on our workflow that imagining how we managed without it feels like a distant memory.

Great concept, but the app isn't quite there yet

Pros:

Being able to see the engagement and following size for the applicants.

Cons:

There wasn't a way to really customize my payouts. I wanted my affiliates to be paid a % of the net profits, as opposed to the total order and there was no way to really customize how I wanted my affiliates paid. Overall, the dashboard was nice and the app has potential, but it just really didn't work for my needs.

Great research repository

Comments: Overall, it's been great. It's definitely more suited for a user research style of research (I do market research), but I can certainly make it work. It helps our team keep everything together and helps our organization be able to visit just one place to find past research (previously they had to search through two places, and not knowing where to start, it took twice as long).

Pros:

Ability to tag insights and quantify the qualitative insights we collect. I also love how easy it is to import a Zoom recording so that it transcribes an online interview. Finally, I like that it helps us keep all our user and market research in one place - easier for our team and for our coworkers looking for insights.

Cons:

I wish that Dovetail would prioritize new projects (even if they weren't insights) at the top of the home screen. Right now, I only see insights form my team members, but since I do mostly 'projects' with 'read me' sections, they don't show up.

Dovetail is what i was searching to create a robust research repository

Comments: Its been a good experience overall, i have helped my team's research and data to connect with other teams, and the the 10 licenses limit is too short, because everyone wants to jump onboard

Pros:

It is a very powerful tool although it present thing in a very friendly and easy to use way. It main strength is on the analysis of video, it generates a very accurate transcript, it have AI tools to speed the summary and tagging process

Cons:

Processing PDF is not their strong suit. PDFs look very small once you upload them and the highlighting process is not great.

best tool any researcher can have in their toolbox

Comments: Overall it's the best tool any researcher can have in their toolbox since it solves for documenting, analysing and reporting findings in a smooth way in one place.

Pros:

I like the fact that with dovetail we have consolidated all of our research projects including the recorsings, analysis and reports into a single platform. Also for international companies, the transcriptions in multiple languages and using AI for analysis in a valuable time saving feature. I also love the AI's help with directly extracting the answers to the initial research questions from the transcripts which streamlines the analysis process.

Cons:

Navigating through Dovetail (notes, insights, highlights, etc) is a bit challenging for non researchers. As a researcher, I appreciate the flexiblity but it might not work for other roles. and also it can lead to inconsistent documentation styles across different research projects conducted by different researchers, making it yet more dificult for others to navigate. on the other hand, I also find dovetail not an ideal tool for managing analysing survey data.

Spreadsheets are 2D; Dovetail is 3D

Comments: Dovetail is a game-changer for me because I don't need to have my system fully figured out at the start of a project. As patterns emerge, Dovetail lets me adapt my workspace (unlike rigid spreadsheets!). I love that I can tweak my framework as I go — tags, color coding, categories — it's all flexible. Plus, it's not just for video content. I can pool in different mediums and tag everything the same way. The real highlight, though, is the variety of views: board, canvas, table — I can view my data depending on how I'm planning to use it that day. Dovetail makes research fun and intuitive, letting me interact with it from different angles without the headache of reorganizing everything. It’s a breath of fresh air compared to spreadsheets. It allows research to feel organic yet organized.

Pros:

- Very intuitive to use — the way you can just drag and drop, click and edit, manipulate, view, etc. - Very easy to train a subcontractor or VA because of how intuitive the tool is - Beautiful tagging system that lets you adapt your process on the fly - Granular customization and filtering so you can easily include/exclude content when you want to view it on a canvas, in table format, or as a board - You can easily find the source of any highlighted item so you can revisit the full context - Adding a second user and giving them the right permission level is easy - Brings your research to life and makes it fun and exciting to interact with it

Cons:

- The AI features can see some improvement. The outputs aren't that helpful and not that good - I wish the price point to add users wasn't as high

Magic features help me analyse my research with ease and enables me to spend more time using my research than managing it

Comments: I've used Dovetail for 2 years in two different organisations. It's been an absolute gamechanger as a super stretched Product Designer who's responsible for research through to visual design and a hand full of other roles too! Dovetail is the best tool I have as it's empowered me to empower customer research and insights into my teams, founders and engineers. You need everyone making decisions based on customer insight, not their opinions and this is the tool that helps!

Pros:

Dovetail feels like my research superpower. I easily raved about Dovetail pre-magic AI features because it was still so easy and powerful for helping me take my interviews through documentation and analysing for key insights + sharing and empowering my team with that information. And now, with new magic (AI) capabilities and where I think they are going next with the product, I am not only raving, but I am full fan-girl!!! It's hard to summarise in a few sentences! Now I can import an interview recording, click a few buttons and have summaries, highlights (using my custom tags) and shareable insights. What took me days now takes me minutes and I have more time to focus on using my research than analysing it. Getting started is also a piece of cake because they have templates you can use straight out the box and I use the google integration to quickly pull in my interviews after a google meet recording. I use Dovetail daily and it's become a staple resource from our Founders to our software engineers.

Cons:

Sometimes the transcribing works really well and other times it's a bit off and combines phrases from multiple speakers together in a single block. It's never been a deal breaker though because the rest of the product is so good.

An innovative, powerful user-centric tool created by an incredible team!

Comments: After an extensive comparative audit of repository tools at the time, Dovetail exceeded expectations with its customer service, integrations, and innovative product design during my usage for 3 years. I worked on a small team that lacked in-house research operations support, so UX Researchers were tasked with both the execution of research and management of our work, including the development and maintenance of a research repository. Dovetail helped lighten the load of this additional role and significantly contributed to strengthened partnerships across functions.

Pros:

Dovetail gracefully balances intuitive UX and powerful functionality. It is easy not only for UXRs to use, but also for non-researcher stakeholders at all levels to navigate and contribute. Insights that contributed to broader insight reports and could be highlighted in reels or feeds fit our organization's mental model and gave us the framework to continue educating our stakeholders on the power of UXR. The customizable templates are particularly beneficial for structuring research output and synthesizing insights effectively for various methods and altitudes of projects. For our UXR team, it allows for customization through templates and to easily control for privacy and security.

Cons:

Generally I can think of few cons about Dovetail! At the time, the list of product integrations was still growing, but see that the team has already made significant strides in expanding that list. Dovetail also is extremely receptive to user feedback and truly feels like a user-first business. That said, changes and improvements to the platform were frequent and common. Sometimes this inhibited our ability to stick with an established process with the tool, and it required us to restructure our repository slightly and re-socialize education to our stakeholders on how to utilize Dovetail. Ultimately, however, it was great to see Dovetail lead innovation in this product space for UXR teams.

Great way to collect, monitor, and categorize insights from user research

Comments: Dovetail is a super powerful tool for helping our team categorize, store, and get insights from interviews we have with users. The auto transcribe feature, AI insights, and ease of tagging content allows us to prioritize building better features while never losing a use case or pain point in the sea of content.

Pros:

- Easy to upload, transcribe, and tag content - Auto transcribes calls you upload which is a huge plus - The AI feature pulls insights from your recordings - Your able to jump to points in the call from the transcript or tags - The insights board feature is super useful - Great collaboration features - Able to collect recordings from various projects and synthesize findings for other stakeholders - Our PMs and UX designers are able to track customer feedback on new features and current features and build a robust collection of pain points, use cases, feature requests, and other feedback.

Cons:

- some workflows feel a bit clunky at times and I wish there could be less clicks do to certain things - I wish there were more visualization types to build reports - I would like more filter options

Beautiful way to conduct customer research

Pros:

Dovetail is EXCEPTIONAL at customer research. It's built specifically for this use case and it feels like they've thought about every single detail about it. I love that you can drop a transcript or a video interview and get it transcribed in seconds, ready to be analyzed. The highlights and tags methodology is scalable and you can customize it to whatever research process or nomenclature you use. Dovetail's interface is beautiful, making it an absolute joy to use day in and day out.

Cons:

It can take some time to load highlights if you have a large project.

Great way to maximise research effectiveness

Comments: Fantastic, has helped me answer research questions from stakeholders that otherwise would have been difficult or impossible.

Pros:

Video transcription and tagging - now considered the new essential repertoire for my research. Easy to use, easy to share with others, great for organising tagged findings.

Cons:

The insights feature is not the easiest r most comprehensive to pull together your overall findings to summarise to stakeholders. (e.g. can't separate out different types or phases of insights so can end up with 1 big bucket of hundreds of items. Not that intuitive to add things to insights as you go along).

Now to effectively use your qualitative research

Comments: As our business space grows we are using Dovetail to capture data that is then used to validate ideas about new products or features as well as use our archive to identify insights and painpoints we were not aware of prior.

Pros:

The ability to tag data and then synthesise that data with quick and easy functionality is really effective in comparing notes across multiple qualitative research documents.

Cons:

The UX around building insights takes a little bit of discovery. Adding tags or highlights into an insight has resulted in me adding, deleting, trying again... a few times.

great tool for user research

Pros:

Ive been using Dovetail for user research for 3 years now, it is definitely one of the top SaaS companies for User research. The new AI features are not perfect but incredibly useful. the ability to transcribe right in the product and have a summary created within minutes is amazing. I absolutely love the short clips that are created from all the tags, a perfect small video to present to product teams about a specific feature easily created for you.

Cons:

I wish it was easier to manage tags in a big team. it is hard to scale the usage of the product and we have had more success in using it within a smaller sized team.

A great customer insight tool for growing enterprises

Comments: My team and I started using Dovetail early on and it's provided value from day one and has only improved. Dovetail gives my team a centralised location to store and reference our user research, ensuring data is never lost or fragmented. It has also helped to align our day-to-day product work and to onboard new team members with existing projects. The recent introduction of AI tools such as Summaries has greatly improved the rate of communication to PMs and key stakeholders ahead of final results and more formal planning.

Pros:

- Improved Product team alignment - Customer insight retention - Project onboarding

Cons:

There are some quirks in the layout and design of certain functionality but these are minor overall.

Great tool for processing user interviews

Comments: Dovetail helps us keep all recordings and insights from interviews in one place. The major benefit is the ability to use tags to classify insights and quotes from customers, making knowledge easily accessible when needed. We often take screenshots from Dovetail and paste them into our work boards to help set the context for meetings or to advocate for a user pain point we believe should be addressed.

Pros:

My team and I have been using Dovetail for three years now, and it’s our go-to platform for processing user interviews. It's incredibly easy to upload a recording and start tagging insights. The UI is simple and beautiful, and we love it!

Cons:

The navigation within the app can sometimes be confusing, and we've struggled to expand its use cases. While we use it extensively for processing user interviews, other types of feedback are kept separate, which creates some friction that we haven't been able to resolve yet.

A fantastic partner for all research activities

Comments: Very positive; has transformed how I and my team do user research.

Pros:

Ease of use AI summaries and AI search Analysis tools

Cons:

Expensive Limits on number of "contributor" users

Great for Organizing Research

Comments: Overall, Dovetail has been a solid tool for organizing and analyzing research; it’s easy to use, great for team collaboration, and really streamlines my workflow.

Pros:

Dovetail makes it super easy to organize and tag all my research data. I love how I can quickly search for themes and track insights across different projects—it saves so much time! Plus, it’s great for teamwork since everyone can jump in and add their own findings, making collaboration a breeze.

Cons:

I wish it integrated better with tools like Slack or Trello. Also, the analytics are useful but could use more options for customization to really dig into the data.

Changed the way I analyze user interviews

Pros:

I love the way Dovetail offers auto-transcribing videos (to my surprise it worked really well with Polish language), and jumping through that video by selecting the right parts from transcription. With highlighter and tagging I can quickly find the most interesting parts of the video. Before, my team rarely watched the recordings from usability testing, but it changed with relevant clips made in Dovetail. And it really changed their attitude to feedback when they were able to see participants reactions, instead of just summary.

Cons:

When I started to use Dovetail I felt that there should be more guidance on how to organise my work in that tool so it would be most helpful. I had to spent a lot of time to figure it out, and re-iterate on my initial ideas.

Massive Timesaver

Comments: Very good for user research and creating a repository

Pros:

I liked how easy it was to upload videos, get a transcription and then tag sections of audio/video

Cons:

I couldn't always present the results the way I wanted to. I liked the storytelling feature but couldn't always share it easily, or integrate it with Slides/Powerpoint.

Easy to interpret CX Insights

Comments: It is a great platform to use. Easy to interpret CX data.

Pros:

It is great to use the platform for any CX insights. You do not need to analyze each data to see what the customer is telling us, dovetail is already providing that information for you.

Cons:

When it comes to customer insights, it will be great to get more specific insights instead of a vague or general insights. It is helpful to determine exactly what the customer needs.

Dovetail makes it easy to collate, analyse and store qualitative research.

Pros:

I really love working in Dovetail. It is such an easy tool to use and the interface design is intuitive, open and clean making it seem effortless. The real power of Dovetail is that is makes research transparent. All data, observation notes, images and files can be organised in any way that makes sense for the project or your organisation, and can be tagged easily, speeding up analysis, and allowing for insights to be shared quickly and easily. With Dovetail, research data remains accessible long after any research project has finished. This means valuable insights are no longer buried in reports that get forgotten, but can be continuously reviewed and built upon as new data is collected. Dovetail has quickly become an indispensable tool for us.

Cons:

Being a relatively new tool, there are some functional limitations but I have no doubt that the Dovetail team will deliver. They continue to seek feedback from users and are transparent with their product roadmap.

I use dovetail for recording all my research related our products at Freshworks.

Pros:

Dovetail is very flexible to record track and analyze research findings. And it has been our singular repository for all our primary research. Of late we have also started putting our secondary findings as well so that It is easy for us to quickly identify a problem shared by one or more users and the story around that problem that was shared by our users. Dovetails support is very very responsive which adds to the confidence for using the product.

Cons:

1. Subgrouping is still a problem. 2. Doesn't yet support copying and pasting screen shorts directly. Can be a major pain sometimes.

Great software for service designers

Comments: Great place to gather and structure documents/findings/notes in a project

Pros:

User friendly and great functionality for a service designers needs

Cons:

Not possible to highlight text in the documents

Dovetail is exceptional

Pros:

Simple to use, simple to learn, quick to code, quick to understand your data

Cons:

Only one small thing I love to do and that is tag/code everything based on a search query. Most other software can't do this so no big deal. Would like to be able to load in demographic data as well to see my data segmented by that more easily.