No two people use projects in the same way. In this lesson, we’ll discuss how to create views in projects, how they can be customized to accommodate in-depth analysis workflows, and common views used for organizing your data for analysis and making sense of your highlights.

​
What are views?

Views give you control over how you see your data in a project. They are flexible, meaning you can decide what you want to see and how you want to see it. Typically, when you create a new blank project, you’ll see a default view of your notes and insights on a grid and highlights on a board. As a project is a database for related data and highlights, you can change the way you view the same set of data. For example, you can have one view of your data in a grid and a second view of your data on a board. Views are more powerful when used alongside data fields. Within each view, you can customize how content is organized and what content is displayed in two ways – filter and group by.
  • Use Filter to display content only relevant to that view. For example, choose to filter for highlights that correspond to a particular tag.
  • Group by allows you to structure your board view by field. For example, group your data by segment, persona, or demographic.
How you’ve set up your data fields can determine whether or not a note is visible in one group over another. 
Alongside grid view, a common way to view your notes and insights is on a board. Board view helps you visualize segments of your data. Board organizes your data into groups. These groups are created when adding properties to single and multi-select fields in your data.
  • To update your view to a board, open the menu Data in the top left corner, click + New view, then select Board.
  • From there, select which note field to group your notes with under Group by.

​
Organize a project to analyze multiple data types

It’s common for researchers to use mixed methods for gathering customer feedback for a project. For example, conducting a round of interviews alongside a supporting survey investigating the same topic. You can leverage fields and views together to organize these two data types within a single project to ensure they are analyzed together. In this example, we’ll walk through how to set up a project for a related set of survey responses and customer interviews.
1

Import your interviews

  • To update your view to a board, open the menu Data in the top left corner, click + New view, then select Board.
  • From there, select which note field to group your notes with under Group by.
2

Create a single-select data field

  • Open one of your imported interviews and create a data field. Enter a title like Data type and enter value of Interview. For your interview, save the field value as Interviews to categorize that specific data object.
3

Filter your view to show interviews only

  • Select all interview data in your project and add the field value Interview.
  • Once you have created your field and added to any existing data, click Filter then select More. From there, filter by Field and select the field type Interview.
4

Import your survey data

  • Add a column titled Data type and add Survey to all rows in your CSV data.
  • Open your project and import your survey data as a CSV file. Dovetail will automatically detect the field data and map accordingly at import.
5

Add a new view for survey data

  • In the top left corner of your project, click Filter, then All to open a dropdown menu. In this menu, click + New view, then select Table.
  • In the top menu, click More, filter by Field and select the field type Surveys. This will then filter to show only survey data housed in your project.

​
Affinity map highlights with canvas

Once you have a few highlights created across your notes, you’ll start to see themes in your raw data. If you’re used to working with post-it notes or digital whiteboard tools like Miro, you can collaborate with your team in canvas view to group highlights into themes. We recommend taking advantage of magic cluster as a starting point to review and refine themes across important moments captured in highlights.
  • To do this, open Highlights in your project. You will see all highlights created in the toolbar on a canvas.
  • Start by selecting All highlights to add to your canvas. Once on your canvas, select Cluster to group highlights automatically.
  • From there, you can manually move your highlights around the canvas to re-group, re-label, or add new groups to your working.
For groups you wish to elevate and summarize into a single page to share with your team, click on into the group and select Add to insight from the menu. This will create a new insight in your project with relevant data points from your canvas. If working with video or audio highlights from customer interviews, usability tests, concept testing or sales calls, any insight created will automatically stitch together all clips into a single reel that you can share.