E-Sign
Simple and secure electronic signatures
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.
Context
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.
Challenges
- 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
My role
- 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
Delivering a better inbox
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.
The that end, we introduced the following:
- searching by participants in addition to envelope name
- directly displaying users that are key to certain stages without having to open the envelope first
- more granular sorting by date and status
- intuitive color-coded tags for the different progress states
Regarding the tags delineating each envelope’s state, my first impulse was to feature a distinct color for each state. However, with testing it quickly became apparent such a move decreased scannability. In the end, four colors were selected to illustrate if the envelope was complete, if it required the user’s action, if the process was waiting one somebody else, or if it was impossible to finish.
Managing a signer's list
Another issue users often reported was the difficulty they had managing their saved signers.
The signers’ list that users could build was previously designed to fit in a small modal window. Sorting was limited to alphabetical order and there was no search functionality. Even though each entry could also have the contact’s title and company name, there was no way to sort by or even see those without first opening the individual packages.
The old version straddled the usability line between a temporary list that one created for each individual signature envelope, and a permanent list where users could save their most frequent contacts. It was not great for either use case.
Those were all issues to be addressed in the redesign. To further improve the experience, the option to mark certain singers as favorites, just like one would with their contacts on a mobile phone, was also added. The ability to import contacts from Outlook and Gmail was also planned for the future.
Improving signature request creation
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.
Takeaways
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.
Including developers early in the design process to help define technical and legal limitations was a great time saver
No substitute can be 100% as effective as communicating directly with users and observing them interact with the product
Discoverability is key – having amazing features does not matter if users are unaware of their existence
Summary
During my time with Avanquest I had the pleasure to:
- Optimize user acquisition and retention; from landing page design, through in-app experience, to retention and license renewal
- Improve the SodaPDF.com website and service pages experience on desktop and mobile
- Advocate for greater use of UX practices within the company
- Collaborate with an international team spread across numerous timezones
- Mentor junior designers
- Update the visuals and flow of the Soda PDF Chrome extension
- Conceptualize and design a user management panel for our B2B clients
- Design the next iteration of the Soda PDF app
- Help set up and contribute to the Soda PDF design system
- Redesign the E-Sign service