Release Örebro 5 – New signing experience & Mandatory Attachments
Hi Scrive users!
This Saturday we pushed a huge release containing our new sign view and “Mandatory Attachments”.
It´s a long post but well worth the read.
We named this release after the city Örebro, that means “Penny Bridge.”
Örebro is the sixth largest town in Sweden and also houses the one person at Scrive that works day and night in the background keeping our servers up and running, Tim, who is our Sysadmin.
Sign view is the most important part of Scrive system
We consider the sign view as the most important part of our system. It is the point where customers of our customers are interacting with us. Our current signing experience has been a very appreciated part of the workflow.
However, we felt that it hasn´t received enough attention during the previous year. Meanwhile, the growing usage of phones pushed us to improve the signing experience on devices with varying screen sizes.
So when we started the project of reworking the sign view our primary objective was to make it look and feel the same on any screen size. Our first release is for desktop sized screens, and this is what is described in this post.
Cleaner design
To make the user interface even easier to understand, we’ve worked with a large, simple and consistent design.
The main interface is now white and light gray only, putting the contents of the document to sign in front and center of users’ attention. Cleaner design is simpler to navigate and allows for stronger color accents for user action elements. For example when a user has to enter her name or draw her signature we use a contrasting color to guide her to action. This color can, of course, be branded, however, we suggest keeping a strong contrast between action and support design elements.
Streamlined top to bottom attention flow
The user is guided by the Scrive arrow from top to bottom as before, nudging her to read carefully throughout the whole document and to take all the necessary actions along the way. When all the steps are completed, the user’s attention is directed just below the document to finalize the signing.
The user is consistently guided in a vertical top to bottom flow. This is an improvement compared to the previous sign view implementation that broke the vertical flow with modal dialog data entry windows and a bit surprisingly ended with a horizontal flow for finishing actions. The problem was especially pronounced on small screens, and we have decided to go with consistent top to bottom flow for all different device, screen types and sizes.
Suggestive animation
Our experience showed that users needed a little help getting started with signature drawing using a mouse or their finger. To help them with signature positioning and give the a hint about what is the expected size we now show an unobtrusive animation suggesting how to draw the signature and where to put its baseline.
Mandatory attachment review
This release includes a bonus feature: an author can request a mandatory review of a document attachment. A signatory will be required to check a checkbox confirming that the user “has read and understood the content of the attachment.” The expected use case for this feature is a situation when a signatory needs to actively accept a terms and conditions or a similar document.
Attachments are shown inside the signing page
Attachments are now shown inline inside the signing page. Previously they were displayed in a separate browser window. We wanted the user to be able to proceed with all the actions without leaving the signing page; therefore, we inlined attachments inside the document view. Note that this feature is especially important for applications embedding Scrive signing view.
Other improvements
- To download the PDF you need to click twice instead of once. The reason for this change is to make it harder to accidentally jump away from the signing flow.
- Text fields (outside of the main document) now have titles to make it clearer for the user what type of information they are supposed to enter. It used to be displayed only in the input element placeholder, and we thought this method didn’t provide enough context.
- The speed of the scrolling (when you click on the up/down arrow) is now adjusted to the length of the document. We wanted to make it feel snappy but not so fast so that users lose their mental context.
- We have added many small animations that aren’t noticeable unless you are paying careful attention but add much to the general user experience.
- We consistently use “Swedish BankID” instead of “eID” to make it clearer what are we talking about.
We plan to continue improving the sign view with particular attention focused on small screen devices like phones and tablets.