Capture structured data on notes with fields

Dovetail’s great for storing and analyzing unstructured, qualitative data. Now you can store structured attributes as well with fields on notes. Capture demographic information like name, age, location; contact details like email address and phone number; properties like persona, company, or license; and even someone’s Net Promoter Score.

Fields are shared across all notes in a project so you can consistently capture information across customer interviews, survey responses, or usability testing notes. You can then segment your data by field values in search and the highlights table.

Fields can be created with meaningful names that are specific to your research, and there are several different field types to choose from. For our first release, we’ve included several types: Date, Email, NPS, Number, Phone, Text and URL.

This feature is a direct result of feedback – you’ve been telling us how you needed a way to add structured attributes to notes, and then segment highlights by those attributes. Some customers used tags to fill this gap, however it ended up being a bit clunky. We’ve been listening! Now there’s a purpose-built feature for these attributes.

Start using fields now to store:

• Demographic information about your users like their name, age, gender, role, and location to give more context to interviews, usability testing, and feedback.

• Quantitative data from survey responses like and rating / by connecting apps through Zapier or importing a CSV file.

• Contact details like a user’s email address or phone number, along with the last time somebody from your team reached out to them, and who it was.

• Usability metrics from your usability testing sessions like error and success rates, time on task, or your participant’s satisfaction score.

• Metadata about customer interviews, like the date, the interviewer, location, meeting room, and whether the incentive has been paid.

Filter by fields in search and highlights

Segment your notes and highlights by field values with filters. Create powerful queries by joining filter rules together using And and Or logic in combination with the data in your fields.

Populate fields automatically with Zapier

Use our Zapier integration to automatically create notes and populate your fields with data from over 1,500 apps, including Intercom, Zendesk, Twitter, and more.

For example, start streamlining how you analyze your Net Promoter Score responses by integrating with tools like AskNicely or Delighted. Use Zapier to create a new note in Dovetail every time you receive a new survey response, and bring the data you collect into Dovetail, like Name, Company, Role, and Score, as fields on your note.

Check out our detailed guide on how to analyze your NPS responses in Dovetail.

Complement your qualitative data with quant

Dovetail can now be used to store quantitative, structured data alongside your unstructured qualitative data and tags. Store rating / likert scale responses from your surveys, usability metrics like error rate, success rate, and the time a task requires, or your participant’s satisfaction score.

Filter and segment by these quantitative attributes to uncover new trends and themes across your qualitative data, then capture these in insights to share with the wider team.

Build a repository of your research data with fields

Build up a tapestry of knowledge across your entire organization by capturing the context of a note with fields. Now all of your research data—like customer feedback, NPS responses, interview transcripts, and usability testing notes—can be enriched with fields for easy retrieval in search. Make it easy for past research to inform future research.

Create a consistent global field set that can be linked across multiple projects with workspace fields. For example, standardize how you capture and store participant data across projects, or store usability testing results consistently across projects.

What’s next for fields

This is just the start of capturing and segmenting quantitative data in Dovetail. In the future, you’ll be able to segment charts by your fields, save sets of filters in search and in charts, and inline edit fields in the highlights table.

Start using fields now

Open a note, make sure it’s editable, and click + New field to create a field. Give it a name and choose the type. Learn more about managing fields in our Help Center.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback on all new features! Send us feedback in-product, in our Slack workspace, or by contacting our support team.