DocuSign Joint Agreements

With the Joint Agreements add-on, a DocuSign user has the ability to connect their DocuSign account with other DocuSign users outside of their business, just like you would on a social network. Once an account has accepted a connection request, both parties can share documents, templates, and other materials directly with each other through DocuSign’s network, saving countless hours and making complex workflows simple and seamless.

This product has recently launched to the North American market, and is gaining traction in the Financial Services and Insurance sectors, where broker/dealer and carrier/agent arrangements commonly require two businesses to coordinate an agreement.

"DocuSign unveils the ability for businesses to connect and collaborate securely on the DocuSign platform."

-PR Headline

The discovery process
As the lead designer of the Incubation team, I led the product team from the inception of the idea, to workshopping and prototyping the idea with DocuSign customers, then onto the execution and launch of the product. As a team that was heavily comprised of engineers, I introduced several new concepts that enabled the team to work in a lean, iterative, and customer-centered fashion.

1. The Opportunity/Solution Tree
Initially, the incubations team was asked to build a solution at the request of one client. I influenced the product team to first talk to more customers in the space to assess the market size, which made us realize that there wasn’t just one problem to solve, there were several. To help the team synthesize and prioritize the newly discovered opportunities (and not get too ahead of ourselves by fixating on a single solution) I introduce the team to a framework known as the Opportunity/Solution tree (invented by Product Management coach Teresa Torres). By helping the team narrow their focus to the customer needs and pain points that were most valuable, we were able to gain confidence that we were building a product customers actually wanted to buy.

2. Rapid Prototypes & Customer Co-Creation
Instead of waiting until the very end to get customer feedback, I asked the team to engage with customers much earlier in the process, when we still had only a rough idea on what kind of solution we might build. I developed several quick prototype wireframes in Axure, then talked to several customers for 20-30 minutes to get their feedback. This format proved immensely helpful, as leaving things open ended allowed customers to fill in the blanks and help us understand what was needed in order for the solution to be truly valuable. 

 3. Experiment-driven user testing
Another shift in how I got the team to approach usability testing was to not just test one interface with a user, but to test several at the same time. Because our solution involved user experience patterns that had never been encountered within DocuSign, I knew it would be challenging to find the one perfect approach that would work for everyone. I workshopped with the team 3 UI concepts, then worked with a UX researcher to develop an A/B test with several variants to determine which one was the winner. Interestingly enough, our research led us to combine attributes from multiple variants, allowing us to have a final product that had a significant System Usability Score (SUS) rating.

Results since delivering DocuSign Joint Agreements

• Based on the concepts myself and the team generated, DocuSign earned 1 patent and is pending 3 more.
• All beta customers converted to purchasing the product when it reached general availability.
• Generated more than a million in revenue in its first year of launch.