Manage participants with People

Dovetail allows you to track and manage your interview participants with our feature called People. People can be attached to notes and insights, providing traceability of your interactions with each research participant.

People have ‘person fields’ that allow you to segment your participants for search and analysis purposes. Person fields are very flexible, however most of our customers use them to capture demographic information (like participant name, age, location), contact details (like email address or phone number), and metadata (like interview date or persona type). People are available to your entire workspace and are not specific to a project.

Create people

The people table is accessible from the primary navigation in your workspace. This table allows you to create, edit, sort, filter and search through your participants.

To create a single person:

1. Click Add person.

2. Enter the name of the person, or how you would like them to be referred to.

3. Optionally, upload a photo.

To create multiple people at once:

1. Click the Actions menu (···) in the top right.

2. Select import.

3. Upload your csv file containing a list of your people, following our manual import guidelines.

Create person fields

To create a new Person field, open a person's profile.

1. Click + New field.

2. Enter a name for your field.

3. Select a type for your field. The default type will be text.

4. Click Create.

You can also create Person fields from your workplace settings following the same steps.

Update and reorder person fields

You can update the value of a person field by clicking the placeholder text to the right of the field name.

A person field’s name can be updated by clicking on it. The type of a person field can be changed, however be aware that the values stored in that field may be removed if the field type is changed.

You can also drag and drop each field to rearrange their display order.

Supported person field types

We currently support the following person field types:

• Boolean – A toggle switch for true / false.

• Date – Any date in the format YYYY-MM-DD.

• Email – Any valid email address.

• NPS – Any number from 0-10 on the Net Promoter Score scale.

• Number – Any positive or negative integer.

• Phone – Any valid phone number.

• Text – Any text characters, up to a maximum of 300.

• URL – Any valid website link or URL.

Add people to notes or insights

People can be added to your notes or insights, just like data fields. This provides traceability of specific research you've done related to a particular person. To add a person to a note or insight:

1. Click + New field.

2. Enter a name for the field (e.g., 'Participant').

3. Choose 'Person' as the type.

4. Select the person as the field value.

Filter by people and person field values in search

You can filter search results by specific people or the values you’ve stored in person fields in search. See this help article for information on searching in Dovetail: Search and filter data and tags.