I want to warn everyone about using Dovetail.
Why is that?
About three months ago, I decided that we, as the UX team in our company, could try Dovetail to analyze user test recordings.
We started with the free version and everything went well. We had over 6 projects in Dovetail, over 30 recordings, and we tried out the transcribing feature and sharing the output across the company.
We loved it and I started to convince my boss to upgrade to the paid version. My boss agreed and we looked forward to using Dovetail to its full potential.
And then. Nothing. When I tried to log into my account on Monday, all I got was a message that my workspace had been disconnected.
After three days of email exchanges with tech support, I learned that our workspace had been deleted and that they were sorry.
And that's it, we lost our work for the last 3 months, so I can't recommend Dovetail to anyone because you never know when they'll delete everything you've done.
Hi @ondrej_zmek So sorry about this experience. I checked in with the Dovetail support team and they confirmed that they were able to restore your work shortly after this review was posted.
I've used Dovetail in my community building work to gather customer facing data from calls to survey results and create reports for internal stakeholders. It helps to have a central place to gather everything.
The features have great potential. It is a great productivity tool, saving tons of my time manually transcribing the video. On the other hand, when I tag codes to the transcript it feels like something is missing making it hard to write codes and the interface changes a lot making it harder for me to use. I love the interface way back in early 2021.
I have been using Dovetail since 2021 across three different organisations, and I can confidently say it is an indispensable tool for any product team. When onboarded properly, Dovetail facilitates decision-making rooted in thorough research and allows teams to reuse valuable insights seamlessly.
What stands out to me the most is Dovetail’s commitment to their users. Their product team truly listens to user feedback and actively adjusts their product roadmap to meet the evolving needs of their community.
Also, I have found their Slack community to be an invaluable resource for UX researchers. The community is active and supportive, providing a space for researchers to share experiences, seek advice, and provide feedback to Dovetail team.
Best in class for research repository. Amongst their various features, the standout is their approach to taxonomy. Very receptive product and design teams, and highly accessible customer support.
Dovetail's a blessing for user research; it's got a lot going for it.
It's great for keeping all your research artifacts in one place. Interviews, surveys, customer feedback - you name it, Dovetail can handle it. And finding things later? Super easy. It’s enabled non-researchers to more readily surface prior learnings, without the need for research staff to recall what has been done (or sift through the ocean of Google Drive where research was previously archived). Workspace-level tags have been a godsend in helping refine searches, especially as your repository grows.
As for qualitative analyses, Dovetail’s got some serious muscle here. It integrates with most video conferencing software to make importing interviews seamless. Transcription is usually pretty accurate—though it’s more likely to error when it comes to industry jargon and accents from non-native English speakers. This isn't a huge issue though, as I haven't found a more accurate tool. Tagging is straightforward and works well collaboratively. The UI keeps changing though, which can be challenging to adapt to.
Dovetail has a lot going for it. It’s one of the more robust repository & qualitative analysis tools on the market. It's saved us an immeasurable amount of time over the years. It has some UI quirks and I wish the pricing structure didn’t keep changing. But despite its issues, it’s one of the first tools I’d recommend to anyone looking to build up an organization’s research division from scratch. It’ll make your life a whole lot easier.
I've used Dovetail at multiple jobs and have always found it the best, most comprehensive and user friendly tool. It allows you to build a living, searchable repository, rather than have insights forgotten about in old reports gathering dust. It's a must have for research and product teams who want to build on what they already know and grow their understanding of their audiences.
