The brief was deceptively simple: redesign Trados GroupShare. The reality was anything but. GroupShare was a complex enterprise collaboration platform serving 200,000+ customers across the translation productivity market — integrating project management, automated translation, translation memories, terminology bases, and administrative workflows. It was built on SilverLight, an aging technology, and it showed. An initial experience assessment revealed significant usability problems throughout the customer journey.
But shipping a better interface wasn't enough. In enterprise software, moving functionality around doesn't just annoy users — it can directly impact their performance and compensation. The stakes were high and the margin for error was low.
Integration with B2C tool, Trados Studio
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The insight that changed the approach. Rather than redesigning from assumptions, I partnered with marketing to pioneer user and buyer persona research at SDL — visiting translation offices, attending industry meetups, and conducting remote sessions with GroupShare users and users of competing solutions. We documented what needed to be human-controlled versus automated, what created friction versus flow, and what the product needed to do to earn trust in high-stakes enterprise environments.
Those weeks of fieldwork became the foundation for every design decision that followed.
What we built. The redesign balanced three competing demands: simplicity for daily users, full functionality for power users, and visual coherence with the broader SDL ecosystem. Working closely with the Visual Designer, we shaped a new interface language and design system applicable across SDL's entire product portfolio — ensuring GroupShare's redesign would lift the whole ecosystem, not just one product.
I communicated the vision to engineering and marketing through storyboards showing key customer moments, interactions, and how the experience would adapt across contexts and devices. This ensured teams were building toward the same customer reality, not just a feature list.
The result. Revenues doubled on the 2017 release — the largest revenue delta in Trados GroupShare's history. More importantly, it changed how SDL thought about design permanently. Customer research became the norm for every subsequent project, not an exception. It was this result that led to me being asked to lead research and align cross-functional stakeholders to define the broader product roadmap — the work documented in the SDL Product Strategy case study.
