Form 2021 to 2025, I had the pleasure of working with the amazing people at Avanquest. The company publishes a variety of popular software, including Soda PDF, PDF Creator, inPixio and the Adaware suite. I was initially hired as of a UX/UI Designer and then transitioned to a Product Designer role.

To try one of the main projects I worked on, the Soda PDF online editor, please go to https://tools.sodapdf.com/ or visit https://www.sodapdf.com/.

Soda PDF is an application that enables users view, create, and edit Portable Document Format (PDF) files. The software was originally developed by LULU Software (now Avanquest) in 2010, based in Montreal, Canada.

Soda PDF was initially only offered as a desktop program for users to purchase and install on their systems. Not long after, the company switched to a SAAS model. “Service pages” offering an easy and convenient way to complete popular PDF-related functions were added to the website, serving as landers for paid traffic. A limited online editor was also introduced, with an UI based on the desktop program.

Interface-wise, early version of Soda PDF mimicked the feel of the Microsoft Office of the time. Then, with version 12, Soda PDF was redesigned to have its own distinct feel. Unfortunately, with the lack of an accompanying design system and many new features being added over time, inconsistencies in the UI started to appear.

I joined the Soda PDF product team at the time when version 14 was being developed. My mandate was to help make the user experience more coherent by doing minor tweaks to some of the flows, wording and visual presentation.

After the successful lunch of Soda 14, fresh user feedback started coming in. The company developed a clear roadmap for major upcoming features. The plan was to shift Soda PDF from a primarily desktop application, to a fully featured online editor that would work seamlessly across devices.

We needed to create a new, online-first vision of Soda PDF. That version would initially be released only with the main, most commonly used PDF-related features. The reminder of the old functions, as well as the planned new ones, would be prioritized and then deployed as development time allowed. When feature parity was reached with the desktop application, the online variant would be also turned into a replacement for the standalone desktop version of the software.

I had the pleasure to be given the responsibility to design Soda Online.

• the new version of the app needed to seamlessly bridge the desktop, mobile and web experience
• we needed to stay sufficiently consistent with the mental model existing users had
• the lack of precise feature usage statistics due to broken in-app tracking was a considerable handicap
• the immense amount of features in Soda PDF added a lot of complexity to the project
• the public perception of Soda PDF needed to be improved, in particular how it is reflected on Trustpilot

I started by immersing myself in the software, using it until I was familiar with its every aspect. During that process I quizzed more senior colleagues about some of the more obscure functionality, how and why we came to have it. My next step was to build an accurate picture of how the world perceived the app. I proceeded with aggregating data from online reviews and rating sites like Trustpilot and G2. I interviewed members of our support department about their interactions with our users, and examined support tickets.

I then tested competing offering from Adobe, Wondershare, Nitro, Foxit and others, and looked at the feedback they were receiving online. I spoke with team members about how they saw the differences between us and the competition - what they thought we did better and where we were behind.

My next step was to conduct a card sort with our internal cross-department test group, to see how we could improve the information architecture in the app. In addition to sorting the features into groups according to how they thought the features belonged, I asked them to also mark which features they used the most, and which, if any, they hadn't realized we offered.

Armed with that precious information, I could start work on the design. Here are some of the highlights.

Due to its iterative nature and lack of design system at the time, Soda PDF had the tendency to be somewhat inconsistent in where some tools were located and where and how the menus they opened would appeared. Based on the accumulated feedback and the long time vision for the product, I set to create an intuitive layout that allowed for growth and integration with the Avanquest ecosystem.

The leftmost side of the screen became reserved for major service categories.

The "system zone" at the top would now be home to account, search and other functions that carried across from service to service.

The "tools area" and "side panel" zones would house elements that changed the most depending on the task the user was preforming.

This, together with the more airy direction of the UI's redesign that aimed to turn the user's document into the real hero, made for a more consistent and pleasing experience.

Over the years, Soda PDF had steadily accumulated over 120 features, with quite a few of them being niche functionality requested by specific clients. That had made parts of the interface somewhat unwieldy, resulting in a somewhat overwhelming experience for new users.

With Soda Online, the team got the green light to give the app’s mobile experience the long overdue attention it deserved.

That meant identifying the differences in how users use PDF on desktop and mobile and making sure the interface accommodated their needs. On a simplified level, desktop skewed towards authoring, while mobile tented to be more centered on viewing and filling documents. Of course, the mobile version still needed to provide a well-rounded editing experience. It also had to do a better job of using touch controls.

In the previous version of Soda, a lot of document organization operations would be handled through pop-up windows where users would have to enter page ranges. Those modals would cover the document view, making it necessary that users either which pages they wanted to split, extracts, etc. This made for an inconvenient experience, especially when working with larger documents. To manage this, users ended up writing down the page numbers beforehand, or opening another instance of the document in a separate web-browser window.

To improve this part of the experience, I merged the insert, extract, and move pages features, as well as the merge and split documents features into a single cohesive interface. The option to manually enter page numbers was still available, but users could now finish the desired task conveniently through a visual representation of their document.

Coming soon...

Three months after the release of Soda Online, the team was happy to observe

18%

improvement in user conversion from trial to paid accounts

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.

The ability to provide electronic signatures greatly synergizes with the rest of what Soda PDF offers as a product. Regrettably, while you could still sign document on any device, the full functionality for creating packages to be signed was only available through the desktop application. We needed improve on the current experience and expand our reach by bring all the features of E-Sign to online and mobile.

• turn a complex, deep flow into an intuitive experience
• boost awareness of the product and it's features for both new and existing users  
• bring E-Sign to mobile, both in terms of signing and creating document envelopes 

• familiarize myself with all elements of our current E-Sign solution, as well as those offered by competitors like Adobe, Docusign, Foxit and others, and note the most obvious strengths and weaknesses
• interviewe 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 like better than competing solutions
• liaison with developers to identify technical limitations
• redesign the experience, with integration within the new Soda PDF Online in mind
• conduct rounds of user testing, present findings to the team and workshop solutions 
• prepare the finalized Figma file for devs

• familiarize myself with all elements of our current E-Sign solution, as well as those offered by competitors like Adobe, Docusign, Foxit and others, and note the most obvious strengths and weaknesses
• interviewe 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 like better than competing solutions
• liaison with developers to identify technical limitations
• redesign the experience, with integration within the new Soda PDF Online in mind
• conduct rounds of user testing, present findings to the team and workshop solutions 
• prepare the finalized Figma file for devs

One of the key goals for the E-Sign redesign was the improve the ability of users who send an receive large amount of signature requests (lawyers, HR professionals...) to track and manage he progress of their signature requests. This topic that came up numerous times in user feedback and interviews.

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 easier to digest manner.

Another issue users often reported 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.

Although the design of the new version of E-Sign (for this stage at least) is complete, development is still ongoing due to prioritization of resources. In the meantime, many of the improvements have been added to the live version in an effort to more promptly give users a better experience.

Discoverability is key - having amazing features does not matter if users are unaware of their existence

Coming soon...

Effortlessly manage users an optimize license administration of Avanquest products, no matter the size of your organization.

Avanquest's PDF products had found place in a few major companies and institutions, but growth in that area had stalled. One of the main reasons was the inability to easily manage installations and licenses across large user groups. The current solution we had worked alright for small teams, but became unwieldy when an administrator had to deal with more than a few installations within their company. It was time to create a proper management tool, one that could in the future grow to support more than our main product and be instrumental for our B2B market.

• create a fully-fledged license management portal from scratch
• consolidate the expectation of multiple existing large clients into a single coherent product

• research user and license managements systems, and outline the needs of those running them
• prepare a wireframe presentation of what the the down-the-road fully-featured vision for the administration tool could be
• interview representatives from the companies currently using PDF Architect to confirm their current needs, see what we've missed in out first initial concept, as well as get their opinions on features we were thinking about including in the future
• create a high-fidelity prototype for the initial release, containing the prioritized features according to the needs of our clients
• finalize the XD file and collaborated with the developers during the development process

Coming soon...

Coming soon...