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Use Condens.io + Public Wiki for Design Research Repository

Context and Problem Statement

We want research tooling that supports both 1) internal research operations and 2) public-facing research transparency. This tooling should help our team work more efficiently and effectively, and increase project transparency within the team, for leadership, and to the public.

Decision Drivers

Problem 1: Internal Research Repository Needs

The appropriate internal research repository tool will…

  • Increase efficiency by reducing the time spent manually organizing, categorizing, annotating, and searching through research notes/videos/spreadsheets/etc.

  • Allow for improved cross referencing of study efforts and past research

  • Provide data access to the entire internal team, documenting researchers' thinking and allowing anyone to interpret findings on their own

  • Securely handle PII and sensitive information (storing it in a single dedicated space)

  • Simplify anonymization and exporting/copying findings for public sharing

  • Allow robust sorting, filtering, and grouping of research

  • Include strong transcription capabilities

  • Support multiple media inputs (video, audio, documents, etc.)

  • Offer good export options (e.g. spreadsheets, documents, PDFs)

  • Be a Nava-approved tool (security, compliance)

Problem 2: Public-Facing Research Repository Needs

  • Share detailed insights without exposing raw notes

  • Remove or mask any PII

  • Promote transparency

  • Enable sharing with broader audiences (e.g. Co-Design Group, open source, general public)

Options Considered

  • Dovetail

  • Qualie

  • Condense

  • Public Wiki

Decision Outcome

Use Condens.io for internal research operations and the Public Wiki for external transparency.

(Problem 1) Condens meets/exceeds all requirements, including:

  • AI-powered transcription — Automatically transcribes audio and video recordings, saving time and effort in data processing.

  • Data organization — Centralizes all research data (recordings, notes, comments, findings) in a single secure and searchable repo, which can be shared across research efforts for Simpler.Grants.gov and SimplerNOFOs.

  • Powerful search capabilities — Quickly find specific insights using keywords/tags/filters. You can ask its AI complex questions, and it packages up the relevant data.

  • Collaboration & transparency — Unlimited read-only accounts provide a self-serve knowledge hub for entire internal team to explore the data, leave comments, share insights, come to their own conclusions/findings, and build reports together.

  • Reporting — Create reports, visualizations, affinity diagrams, and artifacts to identify patterns and themes in research data that can be shared with team (and anonymized for the public).

  • Integration — Zoom and Google Drive make importing/exporting easy.

(Problem 2) The Public Wiki is already being used for our public-facing documentation needs. Sharing research findings there will avoid the need for stakeholders to visit yet another tool. And it enforces a clear separation of data that'd public on the wiki (anonymized findings reports, recommendations) and what should remain in Condens (session notes, PII).

Condens Overview - Watch Video

Positive Consequences

  • Increased research operations efficiency

  • Improved transparency (internal and public)

  • Easily-shared data allowing whole team to arrive at conclusions/findings (with unlimited veiw-only accounts)

  • Separation of concerns having both private and public research repositories

Negative Consequences

  • Additional project costs

  • Limited number of licenses/seats for researchers

Pros and Cons of the Options

Dovetail

https://dovetail.com/ — score: 3.42 (out of 5)

  • Pros

    • Good auto-categorization of research data, provides good high level summaries

    • Fast querying across all video file data in the project

    • Good video/audio processing

    • Good transcription

  • Cons

    • No view-only access (can't share among internal team w/o licenses)

    • No AI-assisted tagging (requires labor-intensive manual tagging)

    • Queries must be simple and direct

    • Sorting capabilities are basic, based on manual grouping

    • PII security requires manual handling, unable to blur name/face in video

    • Only supports spreadsheet export; no PDF import/export

    • Bit of a learning curve

Qualie

https://www.qualie.ai/ — score: 3.46 (out of 5)

  • Pros

    • Excellent auto-categorization of research data (you create key questions and highlights get automatically added)

    • Good automated insight generation and sorting/grouping capabilities

    • Excellent querying capabilities

    • Good video/audio processing

  • Cons

    • No view-only access — unlimited accounts, but fees are charged per interview not by seat

    • Sufficient tagging, but done by user role (not in transcript)

    • Does not store participant information

    • Unable to share video clips externally or anonymize participants

    • Only limited spreadsheet export; no PDF import/export

Condense

https://condens.io/ — score: 4.67 (out of 5)

  • Pros

    • Unlimited view-only accounts do not require license (internal team can browse all data and even leave comments)

    • Good AI-assisted auto-categorization of research data, provides suggestions based on tags created (but does not auto tag)

    • Excellent querying capabilities

    • Excellent encrypted PII handling

    • Excellent data organization

      • Session information can be customized to use as sort options

      • Global and project-specific taxonomies

    • Excellent video/audio processing (including PDF imports!)

    • Excellent transcription

    • Excellent export options

      • Can download whiteboards as images or public link

      • Artifacts can be printed or exported for private/public sharing

  • Cons

    • Although public links can hide names and tags, unable to blur face or video (but feature is in development, per onboarding call w/ support)

Links

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