A massive upgrade for over 7000 document signing users.
Role: Senior Product Designer
Dates: November 2022 - March 2023
SuiteFiles is a document management scale up based in Wellington New Zealand that services businesses around the world. Primarily focusing on bookkeepers. SuiteFiles offers a number of features outside of basic document management; client collaboration platform, document signing, task management, PDF tools, email management and deep integrations with accounting software. I was the Senior Product Designer and led the end-to-end design process of features.
The problem
A minimum viable product digital signing product that sold our product to customers needed updating after years of users asking for updates.
The goal
Take the feedback and develop a design that solves as many of those problems as possible, test it and roll it out.
The process
I jumped into some workshop sessions with the product owner, to sort our laundry list of customer feature requests and passed interviews into an initial scope. We focused our initial scope on upgrading the signing request and signing management process so we had parity with the existing features before extending the functionality further with new features.
I journey mapped the current process and from that built a blue sky solution with all the features we wanted! From that we paired back to reality and developed a prototype to iterate and test with the team. The design received great feedback from the wider company over multiple design workshops and presentations.
In the journey map it became obvious where we could improve the process and how we can make users' lives easier. I won’t go into all the details because that requires some depth that isn’t going to make the cut in a case study (this video shows the process). But the solution we can get into. Along with some great insights generated by using other document signing tools as desk research to familiar UX structures across many of them that would make it possible to convert people easily by using similar patterns and insights generated from the analytics we had access to created a great solution.
The solution
We took the existing one way linear signing process and broke it down into three parts, signing request, signing and signing management.
Within the signing request section a new wizard (a staged stepper) was introduced to help users navigate through the process and make it clearer. With the ever important ability to navigate forwards and backwards when creating a signing request without losing all your progress. Along with combining the two previous functions of self signing and sign and multi sign into one simple function, allowing users to effectively change a self sign into a multi sign at any time in the process.
The signing process for signees got a slight update, mostly to allow for further device responsiveness, with an aim to make further changes in the future.
A significant overhaul of the signing management dashboard was a big part of the work I designed. With users now able to view and update details, filter documents, download a signing history pdf, send reminders to signees, complete partially signed documents and extend expiry dates. All of those are now possible with the new signing management dashboard.
I believe these changes will improve functionality and create higher transparency for everyone using the signing function. While also driving more people to use our document signing and continue to secure new customers with the appeal of our improved all in one signing function.
The results
When I left SuiteFiles to move to the United Kingdom, we’d had great feedback from our users when the changes to the signing process launched. Along with launching the document signing management upgrades also designed at the same time to our beta community.
One bit of instant feedback was that users wanted the ability to archive documents in the dashboard so that they wouldn't appear on the dashboard, even when completed. I didn’t think this would be necessary as users could filter the dashboard in a number of ways that wasn’t possible before. But with archiving being a way of ‘tidying up’ the dashboard, turns out users expected that behaviour to be there. You’ve got to know when to admit defeat and just add the feature the people want.
We also promoted the new signing updates to users who haven’t used the signing function recently and had 30% of those users then began using the signing tool, equating to around 630 users. So far we also saw a significant increase in monthly average users of the signing function from just over 300 to over 1300 users.
