E-Sign is Avanquest's electronic signature solution. It enables easy self-signing of documents, as well as legally-binding signing of business contracts between two or more parties. From anywhere, on any device.

Early results from the E-Sign redesign showed

56%

raise in trial account creation through this flow

Electronic signatures are used across business, personal, and legal sectors to securely authorize contracts, agreements, and approvals. Having the ability to both sign and request a signature greatly synergizes with everything else Soda PDF offers as a product. However, while a user could sign documents on any device, the functionality to create a signature request (a document package to be signed) was only available through the desktop application.

After the excellent results from the Soda PDF redesign, the natural next step was for E-Sign to follow suit. We needed improve on the current experience and bring a more complete set of E-Sign features across all devices. Improving our offering on mobile would help expand the product's reach, even if document creation on such devices was more niche.

• turn a series of complex flows into an intuitive experience and optimize the interface to increase awareness of certain E-Sign features for both new and existing users
• improve integration of the signing process to boost creation of new trial accounts for users not yet part of the Soda PDF ecosystem
• fully bring E-Sign to mobile, both in terms of signing and creating document envelopes
• align design, development and legal to account for international requirements and ensure binding legality of the e-signatures

I started by familiarizing myself with all elements of our current E-Sign solution, and then studying those offered by competitors like Adobe, Docusign, Foxit and others. I then leaned on AI to prepare a synthesis from user opinions online regarding what the difference between the most popular electronic signature services were and compared with my findings.

My next step was to interview users within and without of Avanquest about their experiences with Soda E-Sign; identify their pain points and frustrations, in-demand features we are missing, as well as elements they especially liked. At this stage, it became apparent that the current version of E-Sign was not doing an adequate job making users aware of certain features it offered.

With the findings thus far and a rough plan of the direction I intended to take, I met with our dev team to identify potential technical limitations. From those cross-team meetings I learned a lot more about the behind-the-scenes side of e-signatures, including chain of custody and what is required to make a signature internationally legality binding - something that otherwise I would have missed until late in the design process.

The design system I previously established for Soda PDF was of great benefit here - one of the main objectives of this project was to better integrate E-Sign into the Soda PDF ecosystem. Any new additions required were mostly limited to elements like forms and icons. This left more time for polishing components and flows.

A topic that came up numerous times in user feedback and during interviews was the ability of users who send an receive large amount of signature requests (lawyers, HR professionals...) to track and manage the progress of their signature requests. Delivering improvements in that area became a key goal of the E-Sign redesign.

The new version had to make clearer how far along the process status is, simpler to identify issues with the signing progress, and more convenient to find specific envelopes. All of that also needed to be packaged in an easy to digest manner.

Another pain point for users was the difficulty they had managing their saved signers.

The procedure of creating and sending the signature envelope to its recipients received significant improvements. One of the areas I paid special attention to was the introduction of greater clarity and flexibility to the process.

For example, a considerable portion of users weren't aware that they can include more than one document in the same signature envelope. To that end, I reworked the document adding step to enhance discoverability and provided the option for users to add extra documents from the side panel during the envelope creation process. The manner for adding singers was adjusted to follow the same pattern.

A review step was also added to allow final adjustments. It also served to semantically group together certain envelope options that were previously spread throughout the process.

The first thing I needed to consider for this part of the project was how PDF is used differently on mobile phones compared to desktop and laptop or tablet. It was safe to assume that people were way more likely to sign on mobile than to author a signature request. This was confirmed in the questionnaire we sent to existing users, as well as in user interviews I did.

However, one could argue the the results were tilted in part due to the option to author not being available on mobile. At the same time, it's unmistakable that PDF form creation is less attractive on phones simply because of the nature of the device and the environment it's used in. Nevertheless, use cases and demand for it existed.

My primary focus was the make it easy to sign as well as to create envelopes that did not contain extensive forms. At the same time, I tried to make more complex form-creation as convenient as possible.