Dovetail vs. Lookback vs. XTransfer

As a qualitative researcher who conducts client interviews, I find that Dovetail's ability to accurately transcribe the conversations (which, many times, include technical jargon that Dovetail is able to pick up on), synthesize the relevant information, pull highlights and insights, and create shareable reports is much better than other programs I've used in the past.

Incentivized

Best suited to conduct remote interviews that are moderated and facilitated by the interviewer/researcher.

Not the best if you want to do it unmoderated, there are much more sophisticated tools out there. Unfortunately, for a design research team that does both these kids of research, it can be hard to get budgets to get two softwares and hence the Unmoderated Feature can seem super undercooked and doesn’t really do the job.

Otherwise it’s a great tool

Incentivized

• I really like the User Interface, how easy it is to have all your research data in one project and how visual it is to understand where are things. It does have a good User Experience.
• I like how nice and easy it is to create categories or use the ones auto generated as a starting point. It is very easy to create a color coded set of categories that help make sense of the data.
• I like how easy it is to see the video snippet of a specific highlight.

Incentivized

• Organization of user interviews
• Sharing of interviews across the team
• Creating highlights of insights

Incentivized

• I think one of Dovetail's biggest challenges is discoverability. They are constantly shipping new features and adding more functionality, but I find the help articles and videos do not go deep enough or even provide enough help to get started. I'm sure I'm not utilizing the platform to its full potential, and I think better training or onboarding across all tiers would help us get more out of Dovetail. Its hard to even know what you're not using or what you don't know.
• On the Enterprise plan, you get a dedicated account manager who can handle your onboarding. That's the only plan with an account manager. And it's a little unfortunate. When you write into the help center, they direct you to a help article, which again does not go deep enough. I wish there were more opportunities for training and enablement for lower tiers.
• I think Dovetail is amazing for qualitative research, but I find it very frustrating and lacking for quantitative research. I don't think it makes survey analysis very easy. I would be looking for something closer to a Sheets or Excel for quant analysis, but Dovetail is pretty crude in what it allows you to do with survey results.

Incentivized

• Unmoderated interviews is still under cooked as a feature
• The process of how participants have to download an app to start an interview is a large friction point for us

Incentivized

Because we are really happy with the tool and it’s capabilities at the moment. The price increase is the main issue we can have but the features are getting better and better. It really saves a lot of time for our team and allow us to collaborate more efficiently with certain stakeholders that often did not réalise how much research we conduct. Now they can just have a look to it by themself!

Incentivized

As I said, since the navigation changed, I’m a bit lost. The previous structure felt more intuitive, and I could quickly access the sections I needed. Now, some areas seem reorganized in a way that’s less predictable, which slows me down. I sometimes have to click through multiple menus to find specific features or content

Incentivized

Once you understand how the interface works, it works great, but there is a learning curve

Incentivized

I’ve never had any access issues with Dovetail, so I don’t see any problems in that area.

Incentivized

Regarding performance, I would say it’s satisfactory. Adding data and transcriptions is really fast and efficient, and can be done in the background, so I’m never hindered by these aspects. However, all the new AI-generated features are still somewhat slow to run. It’s nothing major, but it should improve in the future.

Incentivized

Support was good, especially when it comes to the capability of your support agents and engineers. But as i am located in Europe, the difference in the time zone made it hard to communicate with your offices and kept my work way back

Incentivized

The training went very well, and we co-built it to really address our needs. I also think it was beneficial to have feedback coming from someone other than myself (since I manage the tool), as it helped reinforce the points I wanted to highlight. The team’s feedback on the training was very positive.

Incentivized

I have used Condens for qualitative analysis in the past, and I really like that product. I think that Dovetail is more powerful in its ability to analyze with AI and organization. One feature I really liked about Condens was the ability to clip and tag quotes directly from the video, as if it were a movie-editing tool.

Incentivized

Zoom was way more expensive and it o is designed to other things apart from just running qualitative interviews. It also requires a different kind of approval and different approval processes to go through when trying to get it simply for qualitative research purposes.

Lookback records, scribes, helps observe and provides a sentiment check as well in the price that it does

Incentivized

It’s very expensive, and we use a lot of features in beta. I think we could also be rewarded for our usage and frequent feedback on the tool.

Incentivized

Management is quite straightforward; it’s easy to change access if certain stakeholders need to use it. The repository features are accessible to all teams, making it a good entry point into the tool. The more people use it, the more powerful the tool becomes, so it seems truly scalable to me. The limits are more financial, in terms of accessing additional features.

Incentivized

• Having a centralized research space is a game changer. Makes it so much easier to hand over research if working with new people and have system in place (using the templates). Saves so much time. We don't have hard numbers on the hours saved but we are much more efficient using Dovetail than without.
• The tagging system in general is amazing and allows for consistency in topic marking. This was non-existent for our team before Dovetail and now we can do much more granule reports with exact # of times something was said with accuracy.

Incentivized

• It allows us to understand our customers’ problems in a very team compatible way.

Incentivized