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SDL Customer Research Program

Why SDL needs customer research

To continuously improve our products and services at SDL we need to understand the context of our customers. This includes answering questions such as:

  • Who are the end users of our products and services?
  • How do they use them, what are they trying to achieve?
  • What are their responsibilities and goals? What means success for them?
  • How are they collaborating and communicating with each other?
  • How do our products and services fit in and support their processes?

In order to answer these questions we try to regularly visit our clients and partners and perform different types of research methods to create and deepen our understanding of the customers context. The resulting data will directly drive our design processes. If you are interested you can learn more about data-driven design in this blog post.

What to expect from a research session as a customer or partner

To truly understand what our customers need, we want to talk with our target users in their normal context. We use this understanding to help us improve our existing products and dream-up new products and services that will further delight our users.
In-context interviews
Our preferred method is to visit our partners & customers but we might sometimes have to rely on remote interviews. An interview normally lasts 1-2 hours. We would like to talk with a few people at a customer or partner site, including someone that can talk to us about the company, its business and operations. That way, we can get a somewhat complete picture of the context and the work performed. Users are asked to, while at their desk or in their office, describe their daily routines and SDL will observe and ask additional questions.

Confidentiality

We ask participants on these in-context interviews to sign a research project participation form that officially gives us permission to use their feedback and insights we gain to inspire improvements in our products and services. Photos might be taken of the computer screen, materials and tools that help the user perform their work. All user information gathered will be anonymized before it is shared within SDL and information gathered will NOT be shared outside of SDL for any reason.

What a research session it is not...

  1. It is not a sales session. 
    We will not try and sell companies and its users new functionality or products.
  2. It is not a issues & bug resolution session.
    We will not try and fix bugs while we are visiting a company. We can provide information about the best path the company can follow (contact support, contact partner, etc.).
  3. It is not a help & support session
    We will not try and help people perform tasks or tell them what they are doing wrong. Of course, if there are specific questions, we will try and answer them to the best of our abilities.
  4. It is not a product roadmap session
    Roadmap sessions are centered around presentations by SDL of the products’ roadmap and the opportunity for the customer to give feedback. These can be seen as high-level variants of the Customer Research sessions, and it makes sense for SDL’s UX team to attend. However, to really get a feeling for how our products get used in a day-to-day setting, we need to get out of the meeting room and visit the work floor. A customer research session can be a good follow-up to a product roadmap session and can happen in parallel or right after a roadmap session, just like more in-depth technical sessions.

Benefits for participating partners and customers

  1. Direct influence the next version of the product(s) you currently use
    a chance to influence the direction of our products, by providing real-world examples that our product managers, designers and developers use to evaluate the applicability of new versions
  2. Direct contact to subject matter experts for the product you currently use
    sign up to be among the first customers of new (beta) releases and enjoy product improvements before the competition does
  3. You will receive a high-level summary of our findings and are welcome to ask more detailed questions (or correct us if we made a mistake!).
    For SDL-internal use, we create more detailed reports, including our analysis and comparison to other clients’ contexts, as well as matches with products ideas which may not be on the product roadmap yet. These will be made anonymous; instead of names of your employees, we will refer to the corresponding Personas (archetypical users).