Users want flexibility to work from anywhere, anytime

Mobile Research

We set out to understand mobile usage and pain points for our enterprise business customers.

Mobile apps are a critical feature of a digital workflow. Our data is telling us that there is an opportunity to increase engagement and usage of the DocuSign mobile app.

My role

I joined the DocuSign team to conduct user research interviews, synthesize and analyze the data, provide feature recommendations, and test updated concepts for the mobile app.

I worked with the mobile product team including three designers, two PMs, and another researcher.

“People are more apt to do things on their phone rather than log into their computer. Computer is not the answer.”

-Sandra, Program Manager

Methodology

12 User Interviews

Each interview was a remote moderated 60 minute interview via Zoom. Participants were recruited using a screener survey. In order to be selected as a participant, the user must:

Be a DocuSign eSignature customer
Use both DocuSign mobile and desktop
Send and sign agreements as part of daily responsibilities
Be a manager or leader of a team (preferred)
Be part of an enterprise-sized company (preferred)

The Problem

DocuSign mobile doesn’t create enough value for our customers.

Summary

DocuSign mobile use cases were extremely limited. Users are strictly using the app for signing simple documents. They rarely used the app to search for contract details, manage accounts, or send documents to others.

Our research findings suggest that Notifications and Feature Discovery are key opportunities to improve the mobile user experience.

Notifications

Notifications are the primary channel to reach our mobile audience anywhere, anytime.

Users always have their phones nearby

8/12 participants reported checking their notifications all day, from the moment they wake up to the time they sleep.

Notifications help users take action on time-sensitive tasks and trigger the use of the mobile app.

The problem is 6/12 participants have disabled DocuSign notifications on their phone because:

They are already getting redundant notifications from other apps like Outlook or Gmail
They receive too many DocuSign notifications that don’t matter to them

“Notifications give me a sense of priority so I can make an important decision.”

-Sam, Head of Procurement

Key finding

Users need to see value in the DocuSign notification experience immediately, otherwise they will disable the notifications

Notification recommendations

Always include action items in your notifications — Our notifications need to include **action items** that can be easily and quickly accomplished through the mobile app.

Let users mark certain documents as priority so they receive immediate notifications about that doc — Let users mark certain documents as **priority** so they receive **immediate notifications** about that specific document

Clicking on a notification should take you directly to an action card on the mobile app

Users can set notification and follow up options on their desktop when creating a document

Discovery

Encouraging our users to explore and investigate on mobile will drive engagement and usage.

Users want flexible and robust features to get work done

Use cases for DocuSign were extremely limited and did not reflect the investment we made for mobile features.

Instead of using DocuSign for their document needs, our customers turn to other tools like document libraries, excel, or email.

5/12 participants complained about the inability to import documents from another drive into DocuSign mobile. Our Sign & Return feature is a solution to this user problem. However, none of the participants mentioned using or even knowing about the Sign & Return feature.

“It’s so funny. I’m looking at my documents and I see [Sign & Return] and I don’t even think I ever realized it was there… How do people know and make the most out of the app?”

-Alan, Sr. Director, Services

Key finding

Users will not seek out mobile features for themselves. DocuSign must take an active role in championing and incentivizing the mobile experience.

Users need to have quick ways to investigate their documents through search and dashboard tools.

Users need to explore the app and discover how DocuSign can help them in ways they don’t expect, like Sign & Return.

Discovery recommendations

The search bar needs to have more robust filter and search tools to help users find information about documents — The search bar needs to have **robust filter and search tools** to help users find information about documents

A document dashboard with clear action items and filtering options helps our users solve problems before they become critical — A document **dashboard with clear action items** and filtering options helps our users solve problems before they become critical

Use in-product communication cards to tell users about new features — Use **in-product communication cards** to tell users about new features

Tell desktop users about how mobile can help them with their tasks — Tell desktop users about how **mobile can help them with their tasks**

Next steps

Research to inform direction

We understand that there are problems with our mobile experience, but we need more insight about our users.

The mobile team has been outputting lots of new features, but we are not making a strong impact. Before we start building more solutions, I am working to ensure that the team is aligned on what problems are worthwhile and important to the user.

The next steps for my research is:

Literature review of all our mobile features and users.
Create a mobile persona for easy digestion by product team.
Evaluate usability of the mobile app through contextual inquiry and system usability tests.
Craft new concept tests to address issues in the UX found in previous steps.

We are still trying to understand: What’s important to mobile users? What are the challenges that they face? What tools are they lacking? And how can DocuSign help those users?

My takeaways

Translating research into products is a group effort

Research involves a lot of stakeholder management. Without buy-in from product teams and leadership, the research findings and recommendations will fall flat. I learned to involve myself early and often with stakeholders. That also means catering my presentations to pique the audiences’ interest. Research is not just data and reports, it is about telling a story of how the user persona struggles with tasks and the ways our product teams can help that persona.

Planning is critical to research success

Stakeholders have great ideas and concepts but there is limited time and capacity for research to conduct tests. I learned to prioritize research tasks and build a research plan that keeps everyone accountable and visible on current progress. With good planning, all stakeholders can receive findings that are important to their products in a timely fashion. Sometimes, that means I have to say no to some stakeholders. I learned that it’s better to dedicate your time refining and deeply understanding one or two features rather than only briefly understanding five or six different concepts.