Web app · 2019
Fieldnote
Turning hours of interviews into insight teams can act on
A collaborative research workspace that helps product teams tag, synthesise and share what they learn from customers, taken from private beta to 40,000 teams.
- Client
- Fieldnote
- Role
- Senior product designer
- Timeline
- 2 years
- Year
- 2019
Results
- Teams using Fieldnote
- 40k
- First-week activation
- +58%
- Net Promoter Score
- 62
The challenge
Research teams were drowning in their own material. Interview recordings sat in one tool, notes in another and highlights in a slide deck nobody opened twice. Fieldnote's founders wanted one place where insight could be gathered once and reused by everyone.
The approach
I joined as the first designer, two months before the private beta. We set up a weekly rhythm: watch research sessions with real customers, then ship small improvements the following week.
- A fast highlighting flow that turns any sentence in a transcript into a tagged, shareable insight
- A synthesis board that groups highlights automatically and lets teams rearrange them like sticky notes
- Shareable insight pages with the original quote and video, so evidence travels with every finding
- A keyboard-first interface that I built together with the engineering team
The outcome
Fieldnote grew from 40 beta teams to more than 40,000 in two years. Activation improved by more than half after we redesigned the first-run experience, and the synthesis board became the feature customers mentioned most when they recommended the product.
She doesn't just hand over designs, she ships them. Mara built a big part of our interface herself, and years later our engineers still call it the cleanest code in the product.
Daniel Okafor
VP of Engineering, Fieldnote
