Hate to love ya, DocuSign
In October of 2022, my partner and I decided we had to face the music: the American dream was a sham but we still fell victim to its irascible calling.
“You want a house of your own.”
So we did the thing. The Zillow thing. The Redfin thing. We got ourselves a realtor. We virtually toured, we goaded my partner’s parents into viewing homes for us (sorry about the cat-pee-basement, y’all).
And then… we found one. A house. The House. We put in an offer. It was accepted. We drove all the way to Maine from Baltimore the day after Thanksgiving to go do an inspection. We countered. They were like, nah. It fell through. The end.
Except… it wasn’t the end. It was the beginning. The beginning of my love/hate (mostly love) affair with DocuSign. That experience was my first time reading through a Purchase and Sale agreement, not actually scanning a DocuSign document and blindly tapping the little Sign/Initial Here button as it whisked me from start to finish, but actually reading the document. And listen… I noticed some things.
Are my eyes bad or…
I’m not going to tell you I have great vision. I don’t. My hindsight isn’t even 20/20. But seeing as part of my job is literally moving pixels around, I feel like I generally have a pretty good sense of when something is legible or not. And there is definitely something off about reading a DocuSign document.
Sure, it’s legible. But it’s not crisp. And because of that, I constantly found myself having to physically place myself within eight inches of my screen in order to really focus on what I was reading, otherwise I risked my eyes turning to the Sahara and/or donuts: gritty or glazed over.
Why is that? Well, likely because all DocuSign is doing is using their proprietary OCR to take a once-paper document, in this case the Purchase and Sale agreement, and turned it into a signable thing. It isn’t even editable for us signers - that’s all done externally (I imagine) in some PDF tool like Acrobat. And then the creator of the DocuSign version of the document says, sign here, here, and here. Initial here, here, and here. And DocuSign overlays those rules on the document and voila! There’s my purchase and sale a digital approximation of my signature, ready to become proof in a court of law, should it be needed.
So, is this bad?
Define bad. Is the fact that the legibility of the document inherently bad? No. But is the legibility of this incredibly important and legally binding contract important in that it should not require its signer to physically force themselves to focus in order to comprehend the letters on the page? I’d say yes.
In a scenario where I am legally bound to whatever words are on this page, and I struggle to make myself focus on the page because the slightly fuzzy halo around the Times New Roman ultra-tightly kerned text makes my eyes go wonky, I’d say that the legibility of this document is really important to an ethically robust experience.
But that’s just the way the technology is right now. Even sharpening the contrast in some manner may not necessarily improve the text’s legibility. Honestly, if you’ve ever toyed with adjusting the sharpness and contrast of black text on a white background before, you know that sometimes that makes it even harder to focus. Is it DocuSign’s responsibility to make the text legible? I don’t know. I don’t think so. It’s their job to provide a platform that facilitates digital signing of documents. And they do that really well.
Moving on… (literally)
Let’s talk about movements. Animations. Zippity-doo-dah-ing users from one place to the next without so much as a whisper about what they’re zipping past.
When you first open up a DocuSign document, you are given a little prompt that says, Hey - you ready? Buckle up!
And you say, I’m ready!
And then DocuSign drops you immediately on the first of however many interactive signing boxes, which you either sign with a signature you created or you chose from their uncanny valley collection of signatures, or you add your initials, from the same batch of it’s close enough pairs of letters.
And if that box is at the very top of page 1, amazing. If it’s at the very end of page 75, welp, guess that’s that. Are you going to go back and read those 75 pages you were whisked past? You probably should. But will you? Maybe not.
And the animation! The animation is to die for. I love it. The perfect equation of easing in and out, with the tiniest bounce at the end as you land where you’re supposed to land. Sign here, love. And then you tap and then you are again whisked to wherever you are to be next, without a care in the world about what is whizzing beneath your cursor as you speed towards your next signature.
So, is this bad?
Is this bad? I mean, from a visual and animation design perspective, it’s damn near perfect. The precision of the easing, the perfect landing with the signing box not too high or too low within the viewport - it’s pristine.
But does this type of animation promote good I’m about to sign my life savings away hygiene? Between October 2022 and October 2023, I signed over 20 documents, and I won’t lie - I skimmed a bunch. There was no way in our document to have a collaborative conversation or editing moment, no way to copy and paste, no way to be a part of the management of the document.
There were definitely items I read in more detail and even caught blatant mistakes from our or the sellers’ realtors that should have been caught but weren’t, and I’m sure there’s plenty of language in the P&S we are now legally bound to for the house we’re purchasing that my partner, our realtor, and I all might have missed. An errant comma, a missing dash - it’s all so much to read and my eyes are tired.
In a scenario where I missed something in that 75 page document that ended up landing me in court in some terrible future, could I point at DocuSign and say, hey pal, this animation and navigation jacking you implemented in this experience caused me to miss crucial information that no reasonable person could have been expected to scroll back 75 pages to read? Doubtful.
And is the scroll-jacking in and of itself a dark pattern? I think it comes down to intent. Does DocuSign intend to design me into an experience where I am intentionally manipulated into making a choice that is not in my best interest? They’d say no. I could have gone back and read that whole 75 page document and I should have done that. But is it a dark pattern if the creator of said 75 page document intentionally put that signing moment on page 75 when it could have just as easily been handled with an initial elsewhere? Maybe.
So, is it bad? I don’t think so. In fact, there were several moments during our most recent use of DocuSign where we were expected to send a quick - and I mean quick - signature back during our due diligence period where we were able to breeze through signing in less than a minute flat. And in that moment, I was grateful for the easing in and out of that animation, because it made me feel fast and efficient and the entire experience effortless. Might I have missed something that our agent forgot to tell us about? Definitely. But did I sign it fast? You bet.
What I love and hate
I love that DocuSign…
makes me feel like I’m fast and efficient
took the care to intentionally design an animation experience that I could easily describe with noises and whooshes and pops - exactly how I design animation
designs their UI to mimic the feeling of finding those little sticky Sign Here tabs you inevitably find on a 75 page document no one expects you to read (until you’re on the bench, in which case, you absolutely should have read every ligature of every letter on those pages, you fool!)
I hate that DocuSign…
makes me feel like I’m being set up. What happens if I miss something? Whose job is it to tell me when something changes? Should I have read that entire section?
makes my eyes get glassy when I review some documents. I already sit like a shrimp in my fancy desk chair and definitely don’t take advantage of my standing desk enough. I don’t need my technology necessitating my nose be touching my screen (ew)
is structured in such a way that I feel separate from the document I am interacting with. The touchpoints needed to sign a document are at least three, if not more: myself, DocuSign, and my agent. And then whatever tool my agent is using to manage documents, which is likely different than the tool they’re using to create and edit said documents.
But I can’t deny that if we’re looking at DocuSign from a JTBD standpoint, they nailed it. I get a document. I sign it. I hit finish. And I’m done. It’s easy (too easy). I love that it makes me feel accomplished, it doesn’t get in the way of my success, and it mirrors much of the real world.
And yet…if you find me on the stand, you can bet I’ll give the whole it’s too fast! a try. Just to see what happens.