Building a Workflow Tool

Rethinking e-signature as processes and steps rather than just a scribble signature.

Context

"E-signature is a single point solution."

This is the problem we needed to overcome. DocuSign needed to go beyond the single moment of signing people knew us for. We knew there's entire processes before and after signing and sought out to build a product that addressed to expand the offerings and values of DocuSign to our customers and prospects.

Persona

DocuSign is known as a easy to use tool that anyone can get started with and so we didn't want to focus on our Developer persona but rather the Process Builder, who is responsible for building out assets in DocuSign using WYSIWYG tools rather than code.

Method & Goals

We had an existing understanding of the problem due to previous work from our contract lifecycle management (CLM) product and research team so we had a grasp of the "why" so the main questions were the how and who,

How is this product so supposed to work? How do customers envision an agreement workflow tool to work and behave?

Who is the main target customers? Is it a specific industry? A specific use case within it that makes the most sense?

(FYI: This all different from the user persona that differentiates the goals and tasks of product users.)

We focused on interviews, surveys, and iterative design feedback sessions to help answer these questions and partner closely with other research teams--marketing, value and competitive analysis, voice of the customer and customer experience--to ensure alignment and prevent duplicative efforts.

Doing this would help us:

Understand the mental models and expectations of our target users.
Evaluate and validate concept designs to ensure we're building intuitive UIs for our customers.
Prioritize features to help engineering and product build out their roadmaps.
Collaborate with other teams for insights we don't have capacity for.
Provide quicker turnarounds on user feedback and allow teams to make changes based on it.

Insights

Given that the product has not gone GA (general access) I can't give away too much information but the work I did with my designers and product stakeholders helped us to clarify user mental models to ensure we're meeting user expectations, validate designs quickly to meet deadline for Alpha and Beta testers, get feedback that would shape the roadmap and call out major gaps in the experience, and prioritize third party applications we'll need to integrate with.

On top of this I was also able to conduct usability tests that surfaced important issues in the product that directly affected executive leadership's decisions, and pushed the product team to mitigate the consequences of said issues and shine a light on blockers to work efficiency, velocity and decision making.

Actions

Given all these efforts, the team was able to make design complete, our Alpha and Beta testing phases, move to Open Beta on time, and eventually make it to GA. On April 10, 2024, Maestro was announced as a part of Docusign's launch of the Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) platform.