Why SDL needs customer research

To continuously improve our products and services at SDL we needs 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?

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.

What to expect as a customer

SDL’s User Experience team would like to organize occasional visits to existing customers, and meet with the end-users and their managers to discuss the team set-up, work processes, frequency of tasks, and the match between all of those those and our products.

These visits can be virtual and take the shape of a 90-minute, individual interview via Skype or – even better – a physical visit to a team location with an informal tour, some small-group discussions, and a demo or even a usability test of design concepts that we are working on.

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.