CASE STUDY

Yousign – Improving Forms feature’s adoption

Project summary: improving the adoption of the Forms’ feature

Methods: internal interviews, data analysis, user survey, new mockups, usability tests

Tools: Figma, Notion, Typeform

Role: Lead designer, I actively contributed to the research phase and delivered all design mockups and specifications

Platform: web – mobile + desktop (Responsive platform)

Team: worked with product managers, product marketing managers, and developers

Context

Yousign is a SaaS offering an e-signature solution. As described in this 👉 case study, I actively contributed to the « Workflows » launch: an automation solution generating documents to sign.   

This major feature aims to speed up the content preparation of recurring documents to sign.

How it works?

The Workflow creator inserts variables (blank areas) in the source document. From these variables, a form is automatically created. Each variable is linked to a form question. To make data collection smoother, it is possible to rephrase each variable into questions. Finally, the Workflow creation ends by adding signature fields (define who will have to sign the document).

The magic happens when the form is submitted. A document including collected form data is automatically generated and sent for signature to final recipients. Thanks to variables, data are properly inserted within the document.

Why continue working on this product?

The product’s version 1 did not perform as expected. However, our ambition was to this project a success. That’s why since the product launch, we have run major initiatives to improve our performance:

• a new product naming to reflect better what this product is all about (Workflows are now named « Forms »)
• a new pricing model,
• a new marketing positioning,
• offering a Forms trial on the most affordable Yousign plans,
• offering Forms in self-serve,
• new product features.

On top of these initiatives, we also wanted to identify what were the Forms adoption blockers. This is what I will be detailing here.

The problem we are trying to solve

Forms are not used that much by existing customers: not so many documents are generated via our automation product.

Why is it a problem?

With Forms sold in self-serve, it is crucial to understand the product’s paint points as it can lead to losing sales.

Who are we designing for?

• HR officers,
• Legal officers.

Constraint

The main constraint was the organization. We had to sync with 2 other squads to ensure design changes we might do, fit existing product flows as well as upcoming ones.

What were the expected impacts?

• on users: save time, fewer errors, more compliance,
• on Yousign: MRR increase.

Research

To discover why Forms did not meet the expected adoption, we defined a discovery plan including these initiatives:

• internal testing sessions
• user funnels analysis
• user survey
• user tests

Internal testing sessions

Format: Workshop

Attendees: product designers, product managers, and product marketing managers

Length: 50 minutes

Used tool: Miro

Analyzed design: 👉 View flows

Workshop part 1 – feedback sharing
Using virtual Post-it, attendees have been asked to share their feedback on the 2 main flows of the product:

• The creation flow (showcasing various steps to create a Form)
• The execution (showcasing how to use an existing Form)

Workshop part 2 – synthesize

For this second part, attendees had to organize their feedback within this canvas:

• « What works well »
• « What is not understood / clear »
• « Ideas » (improving existing screens or adding new features)

However, before filling out the canvas, we tried to put our attendees in our user target shoes:

• Legal officers,
• HR officers.

To do so, we created groups of 2 and assigned them a document type related to their persona:

• a fake consent attestation document (legal officer target)
• a fake promise to hire document (HR officer target)

Results

Overall, we did not notice any major differences between « legal officers » and « HR officers » groups (maybe the limit of playing a role vs. being a « real user »).

🤩 « What works well »:

• Form creation – Document upload: The illustration highlighting the double brackets
• Form creation – Document upload: The document drag and drop
• Form creation – History statuses of the signature request (from collecting data to generating the document to sign)
• Form execution – Data integration within the document to sign
• Form execution – Customizing the wording email invitation (to sign the document)

 😵‍💫 « What is not understood / clear »

• Form creation – Document upload: The information density is too high (too many key ideas to process at the same time)
• Form creation – Document to sign preparation: Signer types are not clear (« Always the same person » vs « Someone requiring data collection »)
• Form creation – Form customization: changing field types is quite « hidden »
• Form creation – Form customization: it could go further
• Form creation – Form settings: « names » are a bit confusing (Workflow name vs. Signature request name)
• Form execution – Form submitted: it feels strange to have a cta inviting a user to submit a form right after submitting one
• Form execution – Email notification (Form submitted): the wording could be improved

💡 « Ideas » (improving existing screens or adding new features)

• Form creation – Document to sign preparation: make signer types clearer by adding a tooltip with signer examples
• From creation – Document to sign preparation: create a visual distinction between signer types (« always the same person » vs « someone requiring data collection »)
• Form creation – Form customization: for short answer field types, clearly indicate how many characters can be input.
• Form execution – Forms list: surface better the link to copy the form

User survey

Context

Notes:

• results based on users having started creating a form in the last 30 days (several hundred users in total) until the activation of this form,
• users with a Yousign account have been excluded,
• only a single entry per user was counted,
• the time window for a user to complete the funnel was 7 days,
• only looked at the first time the path was loaded by the user.

Key learnings

Design

To verify the main pain points identified during the research phase we also ran user tests.

User test round 1

• Duration: 30 minutes
• Method: remote moderated via Google Meet
• Protocol: user test ran on the production environment (a user account was created prior to the test session)
• Objective: verify pains identified during the research phase
• Testers panel: 12 users (there was 4 no-show)
• Targets: french active App users who never tried creating a form
• Tested hypotheses:
  • As a user, I don’t understand what Forms are
  • As a user, I don’t know how to create a form
  • As a user, I don’t know how to use a form
• Design version tested:  👉 View flows

User test – Round 2

The first round of user tests helped us understand the pain points related to the form discovery. The main learning was that users felt lost along the form creation. They did not know have to do especially once they arrived on the upload page.

For time reasons, we did not have time to make all the design edits we wanted.

Focused on the creation flow, here were the design changes made:

• Start the creation process with a page highlighting actions to build a form
• Breakdown the docx preparation phase into multiple steps
• Delete the step where the user needs to define questions
• New form customization page
• Breakdown the settings page into 2 parts (document settings vs. form settings)

User test details:

• Duration: 30 minutes
• Method: remote moderated via Google Meet
• Protocol: test ran on Figma prototype
• Objective: verify pains identified during the research phase
• Testers panel: 12 users (there was 4 no-show)
• Targets: french active App users who never tried creating a form
• Hypotheses to test:
  • The user understands how forms work
  • The user understands how to mark variables
  • The user understands he/she needs to save/export the document in docx format on its computer
  • The user understands the concept of placeholder signer
  • The user understands what is the purpose of the form customization step
  • The user understands how to edit variables and turn them into questions
  • The user understands the difference between “Public” and “Private” forms?
  • The user understands how to use the newly created for
• Tested prototype:  👉 View prototype (in 🇫🇷 french)

Hypotheses testing results

Results

From a design standpoint, edits made after running user tests helped us pass most of our hypotheses. Before sharing what the final flows looked like, here is how we tackled some of the main pains identified during our research phase.

Explain better how forms work

From user research, we know that the Form value proposition was not necessarily clearly understood. When users clicked on the Forms section, they landed on a text plus video page explaining the Form concept. This approach did not work well as the video was too abstract and fast-paced. Here is what it looked like:

After running a benchmark, a few approaches stood up. The one we decided to follow was to create an animated gif that would reflect the connection between the form and the document to sign. From there I collaborated with a motion designer and a PMM to come up with an animation conveying clearly our value proposition. Here is what the animation looks like:

Explain better how to prepare the document prior to uploading it on Yousign

Thanks to our form creation funnel analysis and our user test, we knew we lost a large portion of our users while they were preparing their documents (prior to uploading on Yousign). Our hypotheses explaining these results were:

• we not providing enough context along the way. We are not stating enough that the creation process is about building a reusable template.
• we are probably too text-heavy. We noticed several times people don’t read many instructions.
• we are not explaining enough the connection between the form and the document. Users don’t understand how data is inserted within the document.

Here is for context what the original design looked like:

To move the needles, I teamed up with the design directors and came up with a step-by-step approach where expected actions from the user are broken down into multiple screens:

1. Overview of the form creation process
2. How to insert variables within the document
3. Explain in which format the document needs to be saved

Make the form customization clearer

One of the elements that made users feel lost while creating a form where the form customization part. In the original flow the form customization part where users can turn variables into questions as well as change answer field types (short answer, long answer, email, was broken down into different steps (screens). As a reminder here is what it looked like:

From user tests, we learned that people did not understand the back-and-forth related to the form customization. Here is how the form customization was broken down:

1. Screen 1 – Form custom customization part 1 – Turn variables into questions
2. Screen 2 – Document to sign preparation – Add signature fields over the document
3. Screen 3 – Form custom customization part 2 – Edit form answer field types as well as various settings.

For context, read this 👉 case study to understand why we designed the flow this way.

This back-and-forth feeling created confusion in the user’s mind. On top of that, on screen 3, users also felt confused and thought they had to fill out the form themselves. They did not understand at this point they were simply building the form which would be filled out, later on, by form respondents.

With these insights in mind, I decided to:

• merge into one step, form customization elements
• remove upfront form fields to avoid misleading users
• improve wording instructions to make clear that at this step, users are building a form template

Here is what the new form customization step looked like:

Improve settings information architecture

Another design element we changed after collecting user feedback was to clarify settings. In the original design, settings related to the form as well as the one from the signature request were regrouped into a single page. It created a pretty busy page and contributed to confusing users on the purpose of what they were building. Here is for context what was the original design:

Following our new approach to breaking down information to make form creation easier to process, I split form settings and signature request settings into 2 distinctive steps:

Enrich the Forms product with a new key feature

While we working on improving adoption, the design of a major new Forms feature had already been completed. This feature named « Multi-respondents » allows Form creators to define multiple people to collect document data. For a single document, creators will be able to define which information will be collected by whom. For context, this approach led us to generate a unique Form per contributor (individual in charge of collecting data).

Even if this initiative was not about increasing Forms adoption, I wanted to share what the new Form experience now looks like with this new feature.

Go beyond design initiatives

Following the objective to improve Forms adoption, I also collaborated with the marketing team to create an onboarding experience.

Focused on users who never tried Forms, the intent was to display an interactive walkthrough. The objective was to help them create their first form as well as experience the benefits of executing this feature. For time and resource reasons, we used our third-party messaging tool (Intercom) to build this onboarding experience. Triggered after clicking on specific CTAs, the onboarding experience looked like modals displayed over the content. On the design end, using this tool did not allow us to have full control of the modal rendering. This explains why Intercom modals don’t fit the Yousign brand. Here are some screens showcasing what it looks like:

Takeaways

Working on this project has been very rewarding even if it was sometimes challenging and intense. I have been involved in the project since day 1 when it was still an idea from the Yousign executive committee until making Forms a self-serve sold product.

This product launch was probably the most ambitious since the Yousign creation as it was our first intent to go beyond e-signature. Also, the product culture at Yousign remains recent, which probably led us to make some mistakes and did not allow us to meet our business objectives in the first place (to learn more about this project, 👉 read this case study). This experience led the company’s leadership to revise business expectations for Forms. From a standalone product that was supposed to help increase our ARR, it became a premium feature helping the company to still be relevant in front of our competitors.

From a design and product perspective, I have the feeling we made some prioritization mistakes as we started to work on a new complex feature (multi-respondent forms) while Forms adoption was meeting our expectations. This led us to make some rework on the Multi-respondent initiative as we uncovered, later on, strong pain points slowing down Forms adoption. The time lost on the rework prevented us, later on, from solving all Forms adoption issues as we had to focus on another company initiative. Another learning from this experience is to not disregard communication with other squads. Despite various rituals and slack channels we sometimes did not communicate enough which made us lose some time while implementing the design.

However, I think we have done our best to make this product a success. This non-exhaustive list of initiatives reflects the hard work we put into it, since the product launch:

• adding new features (e.g.: multi-respondent forms),
• redesigning the creation flow (improving Forms adoption),
• implementing a new pricing model (from a standalone feature sold on top of pricing plans without no restrictions to an add-on with restrictions on the number of documents to sign generated),
• selling this product in self-serve.

I don’t know if our efforts to make Forms adoption better paid off since I left Yousign but I am proud of what we did considering the numerous challenges have gone through.

Thanks for reading.