Strategies for Managing Data Freshness in Dovetail Research

Curious to learn how people tackle the challenge of data "freshness" when working with Dovetail over months/years, especially when mixing both generative/foundational research (which may have a longer shelf life) and evaluative product research (likely a short shelf life). Does anyone have a setup that allows them to distinguish between "archival" data/insights connected to a past product decision and "current" data/insights that should be considered moving forward? What rituals/tasks do you have in place to evaluate data and insight relevance and what do you do with out-of-date/irrelevant materials?

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3 comments

Maegan Pisman
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I created a “historical - use caution” tag that we affix after X period of time elapses or after new studies on the same topic supersede the results of the older stud(ies).
Maegan Pisman
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(very good question — it’s important to do this!)
Faidon Loumakis
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For highlights that are tagged with a topic (e.g. Payment method) I don't do anything.
For highlights that are tagged with an actionable tag (e.g. usability issue) I have multiple tags with status (Usability - new, Usability - reported, Not relevant anymore).
For insights I have 2 relevant insights fields. One is called 'Addressed? '(Yes/No/In progress/Decided against) and another one is called 'Status' where it might be 'Not relevant anymore'
I unfortunately don't have a standard process for updating these. It either happens once a quarter as my standard process of tidying up the insights and issues or ad hoc if I stumble upon an out-of-date issue/insight. I'm still struggling with this though, especially when I want to report on a redesign. For example I may have insight called "The add to basket button is not prominent". Then there is a redesign. But the redesign suffers the same issue. I can't use the same insight as it was referring to an older design. So the less-than-ideal solution is to mark the first insight as 'Not relevant anymore' and 'Addressed' and create a new insight (e.g. The add to basket button is not prominent (November 2024) Great topic, I'd love to hear how others are dealing with this