Casefile

Casefile is a tool for teams who run a lot of user interviews and lose most of what they learn. I built the first version in six weeks with two researchers sitting next to me, which is the only reason it is any good.

The wrong model

Every research tool I looked at was built around tags. You transcribe an interview, you highlight passages, you tag them, and later you filter by tag. It is a sound model that fails for one reason: tagging is work you do now for a benefit you get later, and under deadline pressure nobody does it.

So Casefile inverts it. The transcript is the primary object, search is full-text and instant, and tags are something you apply while reading the results rather than before. The work happens at the moment you have a question, which is the moment you are actually motivated.

What made it click

• Quotes carry their surrounding thirty seconds, so a pasted quote can never lose its context
• Every quote knows which participant said it and links back to the moment in the recording
• A synthesis is a document that references quotes live — edit the quote, the synthesis updates

That last one was the feature researchers described as the reason they stopped using a spreadsheet.