We are lucky to have so many wonderful sponsors and exhibitors at this year’s Advancing Research conference–and we thought you might like to get to know them better! We’ve asked all of them some questions in the coming weeks that get at the heart of why they’re passionate about ResearchOps, what it’s like to work with them, and what makes their products and services special to Design and Research Operations professionals.

BENJAMIN HUMPHREY, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO AT DOVETAIL

 

Rosenfeld Media: Why are you sponsoring the Advancing Research conference?

Benjamin Humphrey: Research as a discipline is rapidly evolving. Researchers are popping up in places you’d least expect, beyond well-resourced tech companies, in startups, government departments, and “old school” non-tech organizations. Organizations are now seeing the value in driving decisions through research insight. Non-researchers—like designers and product managers—are getting heavily involved in research efforts. These trends all remind of the “rise of design” a few years ago, when product design emerged as a valued discipline and the user experience became a competitive advantage. We spend a lot of time thinking about how we can empower researchers to be more effective, and enable organizations to strengthen their offering through knowledge sharing. Getting involved in conferences like Advancing Research helps us connect with the community to learn more about emerging trends and pain points, that we can hopefully help to address.

Rosenfeld Media: What excites you about Research and/or Research Operations?

Benjamin Humphrey: We believe the secret to creating great products and services is deeply understanding the people that use them. Many organizations looked at quantitative data and analytics as a silver bullet to learn more about customers, but over time, we learned that quantitative data is definitely not a silver bullet. In my mind, qualitative research is so much simpler – just talk to people. The trick is scaling it and allowing everyone in the organization to benefit from qualitative research.

Now that organizations are well on their way to understanding the value of research, researchers and product people are increasingly looking towards how they can expand the reach of their research and operationalize and scale research processes. In my mind, this is a natural evolution of an emerging discipline getting buy-in from the wider organization. It’s exciting to be part of a wave and to help researchers where we can through the power of software.

Rosenfeld Media: What types of value and benefits does your product bring to the practice and our community?

Benjamin Humphrey: Dovetail is a fairly un-opinionated cloud-based research platform that helps with analysis, organization, collaboration, and storage of qualitative research data and insights. With Dovetail, researchers store research data in one place from a variety of tools and methods, analyze qualitative data to discover patterns, and create insights to share with the rest of the organization.

There are plenty of tools to survey, record, and usability test. Dovetail is not a collection tool. Instead, we’re focused on helping researchers efficiently analyze all the data they’ve collected, and turn raw data into evidence-backed insights they can share with their whole organization. We believe every organization can and should conduct customer research. Our mission is for Dovetail to become an indispensable tool in the research toolkit.

Dovetail is hiring! They are looking for incredible people to join their growing team in Sydney, so get in touch.