Centralizing Experiment Results: Exploring Dovetail for Data Organization

Hello! We run a lot of experiments in my company, and I’ve been asked to look for ways to centralise and organise the results. Right now, each tribe has its own ways of reporting, sometimes simply putting results in a Slack message, or emails. Experiments can be anything from A/B testing of small design tweaks, to copy and marketing testing. Does anybody use Dovetail for this kind of data? I’m aware it’s not strictly user-related and qualitative, and I’m worried it may confuse search results etc

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6 comments

Philip Wallage
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That’s a great question Giorgia N! At the end of the day, sharing information (such as the outcome of experiments / AB-tests) should be shared where people actually see it. This could be done anywhere from Slack, by email, in Notion and of course in Dovetail. You can upload PDF documents into projects https://dovetail.com/help/take-notes-and-upload-data/ Having it in Dovetail makes a lot of sense. At the end of the day, experiments should be based insights right? 😉 Hope this helps.
Giorgia N
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Thanks for your perspective Philip Wallage! I guess there's no right or wrong way of doing this. But I was curious to hear the experience of people who have used Dovetail for this kind of insights to see how they've done it. Our rule of thumb so far has been to use Dovetail only for insights with a longer 'shelf life', eg insights that can be used over time rather than quick usability test results or experiments. This is both to keep the repository relevant and the experimentation light by avoiding lots of Dovetail report filing and writing etc. But we do need to find a centralised way to store experiment learnings as we want to avoid duplication of efforts and waste knowledge. We'll keep exploring the problem in the coming weeks!
Emi Fogg
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I encourage folks to put their learnings (even if small) in Dovetail, if for no other reason than other software has really inferior search. So there have been times when 1yr+ I'm thinking "oh what was it that we did? I need to find that report" and it would be a total pain to search confluence/slack but I can semantic search dovetail and find it.
Emi Fogg
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But I do often cross-post in other places because Dovetail gets less foot traffic. So it's a great record, but not the sole place learnings are publicized
Philip Wallage
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Oh Giorgia N if that’s the case… I’ve often setup Airtable environments for A/B testing experiments. This is the ‘raw’ data (or source of truth) for A/B tests. Normally, every month we’d create a PDF with the results of relevant (or significant) experiments. You could store these monthly PDF’s in Dovetail if that makes sense. You might also create pages with the insights and link to a PDF from there. If it’s something you’d like to discuss or need any help with, let me know. 🙂
Kate Gaston
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I'm not sure what you all are currently using for testing, but it sounds like you may need to start with getting everyone on the same page as far as testing tools are concerned (I know, way easier said than done.) Whether that's deciding to consistently use Google forms, jotform, Lyssna, UserTesting... or even just deciding that wherever tests are conducted, that they be exported into the same format. Then, you could either organize those results directly in whatever application you are using, or exported and placed into a "repository" of sorts, like Dovetail or Google drive. Consistent naming conventions would also be beneficial here (because what good is it if no one can find it 🙃) Hope this helps Giorgia N!
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