Better Design Research with Eagle, Part 2: Getting Started

How we use Eagle in our design research process

Eagle desktop app on Mac OS.

In Part 1, we talked about why Eagle is our favorite tool for design research.

In this post, we will share more about how to set up the tool, and use it, as well as some learnings we gathered along the way.

Before starting, watch the video demo to get a peek at the sleek features this tool has to offer. We’ll go through the basics in this article, and all of the advanced tools in Part 3.

Eagle teaser

Set up

First things first: download Eagle for your Mac or Windows.

Open the app and create a new library. Select a location for it. You are now good to go!

In order to make the tool fully collaborative you need to host your “Eagle library” somewhere your team can access. We sync it through Google Drive, but any cloud storage services such as Dropbox will do.

Key Features

Here are the main features we use when gathering, organizing, and searching our research library.

Gather

You can easily import one or many images in Eagle with drag and drop.

To get started, the first thing we did was to import as many images as possible. Luckily, there are a lot of ways to do that quickly:

• Drag and drop
• Import from your computer
• Bulk import from Pinterest
• Use Eagle Chrome extension (more on this later)

And don’t worry if you or someone else adds a duplicate image. Eagle is smart enough to detect duplicates.

Note: It isn’t currently possible to see which user added which image. I hope the Eagle team will add this feature to offer more visibility.

Organize

You can add a lot of information about an image in the inspector (right sidebar).

We felt very quickly the need to organize all our images to make sure they were searchable for everyone in a logical way. Good thing is there are a lot of options to do so:

• Add tags to an image, or a group of images
• Add a title, URL, and notes to an image
• Annotate a specific area of an image
• Put images in folders
• Use Smart Folders (more on this later)

Search

You can easily filter down images or search for specific keywords.

Once our library was fully stocked and well organized, the real fun could start: searching for inspiration for our next design.

Luckily for us, there are a lot of ways to search for a specific image, or a group of images.

• Search for tags, notes, and titles
• Filter images based on colors, image formats, etc
• Click on any tag from the tags list

What we learned

This post was a quick overview of installing and setting up Eagle and getting familiar with its basic features. In part 3 of this series, become a pro with Eagle’s advanced features.

If you enjoyed this article, please help out your friends/coworkers to find it with a 👏 or a share.

Raffaele Gesulfo is a Product Designer at Narvar. Narvar helps retailers champion their customers at every step of the journey. Connect with us on LinkedIn or say hi on Twitter. By the way — We’re hiring, check out our careers page.