Clarity by Design

Overview

Context

At Docusign, I worked on a team called Information Experience. We were a team of content designers and information architects. Each week, we hosted office hours for our partners who didn’t have enough budget to hire us full-time. We were like internal contractors.

During office hours one week, a product manager asked us to help her expand functionality for a feature in her portfolio. She asked us to update a few sentences and add another toggle with a label for new functionality. She had no official product design or content design support for this project, just our office hours.

Problem

As we discussed her plans, we quickly discovered a usability issue.

This particular feature is a simple monthly report. Pharmaceutical companies want to generate these reports automatically, to maintain documentation of their regulatory compliance with the US FDA. They pay a lot of money for access to industry-specific features like these.

To send the reports, you must add a recipient and turn the report on. This dynamic was not evident in the interface.

• If you were to turn on the report without adding a recipient, you’d never receive a report
• If you were to add a recipient without turning the report on, you’d never receive a report

Of course, when customers can’t figure out how to use the product, they contact support or their account manager. In either instance, the company has to spend money to answer questions that should be clear in the moment. Whether it comes from product’s budget or support’s budget, companies will always “pay” for unclear, convoluted experiences.

Solution

After walking through the problem together, the PM and I agreed to expand the scope—just enough to add real value without a major engineering lift.

Since FDA-regulated compliance workflows were at stake and no design support was available, I designed the changes myself in Figma.

• Used an empty state to make folks to add recipients before they can ever turn the reports on
• Stopped hiding the recipients list in a modal and add it as a table, first thing on the page
• Combined the existing report history table with the new recipient table to match existing design patterns in Admin and reduce visual clutter
• Revised the information hierarchy so that the recipient list is at the top
• Clearly communicated the consequences of removing the last recipient
• Turned off the toggle-ability of the toggles when folks remove all recipients
• Used a tool tip to communicate why they can’t toggle the toggles
• Rewrote the descriptions to accommodate a few smaller (but important) content needs
• Clarified the purpose of the report to specifically call out Part 11 regulations
• Added a link to the help center as a resource
• Clarified report cadence and set delivery expectations
• Reduced the content reading level
• Fixed terminology issues

Impact

• We increased our Net Promoter Score by 20 points*
• We increased feature adoption by 80%

This is a net promoter score measured specifically for this product, not Docusign as a whole or eSignature as a whole.

Role

• Product Designer
• Content Designer