Final Signing Habits

Improving the signing experience is about helping users feel safe and confident in their transaction.

Context and Goals

The product teams knew a lot about Senders, the people requesting signatures, so there was a desire to focus on the signing experience. Initially it was about getting concept feedback for a specific Signer focused features in support of Mobile's new strategy but talking to other researchers, we realized across the organization people were thinking about the signing experience. Given that this was a cross organization topic, it was decided that two eSign researchers would be working on this--myself and a colleague.

Initially there was a push for concept feedback but we felt that we needed to take a step back and learn more about the final signing experience. Not just usage numbers but the rituals, activities, concerns and emotions that people experience at final signing. We didn't cover editing and negotiating as that was already being covered by the Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) team, who provided some input to ensure we answered their questions about Signers.

Persona

The focus of the study was the Signer but this was a rather broad persona. We knew that people can wear many hats depending on their role, department, and even size of their company. These could influence their responses so we needed to define what an ideal respondent would look like.

Talking with others in our UX team, we realized that the Signer type didn't matter as much as the type of agreement they were signing. Creating features for complex and high risk use cases is more important than simpler, low value and low risk agreements. So we laid out specific requirements about the agreement (e.g. monetary value, length, type of agreement) to find the right recruits for our study.

Method

The possible impact of these feature would be huge. Signers are a large part of our business so my research peer and I knew we needed something with high volume to give our product leadership confidence in any of the proposed features. It would've been nice to do 30+ interviews to understand the wide range of different signers and have the depth of insights, but given the timeline and volume needed, we decided that a survey would be best for this study and planned for qualitative interviews as a follow up (if needed).

We designed the survey but paid for a vendor to distribute and analyze the survey for us. We would've liked to have done it ourselves but because of time and capacity we paid for a vendor to do the heavy lifting.

Insights

We had a few hypotheses about Signer habits and emotions. We thought people would be more comfortable signing if it was a long signing order (e.g. 5 people including legal have to sign prior to the executive). We also thought the number of pages to their typical agreement would determine how in-depth they'd read the agreement, so a short agreement meant that they'd probably read the details whereas a long one they'd be more likely to skim.

What we found is that people care a lot about their agreements and read at a higher level of detail than we expected. We also found that people had clear preferences for what devices they preferred to sign on. People want to make sure they're signing the right things and are concerned about legality.

We saw some clear emptions that people felt at final signing and what they'd find meaningful at this stage. From these insights, several statistically significant, we found validation for the new features we had in mind but under specific conditions.

Results

Given that these features have yet to go live, I cannot reveal the specific findings and how they support the features and the caveats we had to place with them. But the insights provided foundational knowledge for our Signer focused features. Seeing that these insights apply to not just one team but many, which pushed people to collectively create the features and ensure coherence