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

SDL’s User Experience team organizes 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.

What a customer 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. Indirect 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. Get 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).