Problem Statement

Organizational leads rely on digital tools such as DocHub to streamline the document signage process with clients. However, DocHub’s interface is error-prone, allowing clients to submit documents without filling out all required fields. This creates an inefficient back-and-forth cycle where clients must resend incomplete documents, leading to delays. As a result, these inefficiencies have a negative impact on communication, client retention, and slow down the process of finalizing documents. 

Project Overview

Filling out and signing documents should be a straightforward process, but for many DocHub users, managing client-assigned fields can be frustrating. The current system lacks clear mechanisms to ensure the right clients complete the necessary fields before submission, leading to incomplete forms, unnecessary back-and-forth sending and recieving, and workflow congestion.

Our redesign addresses this challenge by introducing a more intuitive client assignment system. By allowing users to assign specific fields to designated clients and enforcing required field completion before submission, our solution reduces errors and improves efficiency. This streamlined approach ensures that documents are properly filled out the first time, saving time for both senders and recipients.

This case study explores how refining DocHub’s user experience can create a more structured, seamless, and reliable document-signing process.

Discovery Phase

Brainstorming

Our team first started by brainstorming ideas for different stakeholders to interview, aiming to identify obstacles they faced within software they use while running their businesses. After careful deliberation, we had landed on two stakeholders to conduct interviews on:

Kay Linayao - Co-Founder and COO of MotleyData

Vanessa Andrada - Owner of Studio FX

The research was conducted using semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions, allowing participants to share their experiences in detail. Topics included:

Daily Routines: Understanding how tasks are managed and prioritized.

Tool Usage: Identifying commonly used tools and their limitations.

Workflow Challenges: Exploring communication, collaboration, and tool integration pain points.

This approach ensured an understanding of the participants’ workflows and challenges, enabling insights to inform design solutions.

Based on these insights, we were able to define our problem statement and develop goals for our redesign. We concluded that business managers and their clients need an efficient, more intuitive document workflow that ensures all required fields are signed without unnecessary delays. To address this need, we set the following goals:

Accelerate contract processing by reducing back-and-forth communication. 

Streamline document editing with smart detection of required signature fields.

Improve usability by automatically highlighting fields that need to be signed.

Competitive Audit

After defining problems that we would like to solve through our redesign, we compared DocHub against its competitors to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement. We conducted a competitive audit with the following competitors:

• PandaDoc

• Adobe Acrobat

• DocuSign

• Smallpdf

In our competitive audit, we concluded that creating a one-click signage feature can eliminate recurring communication issues DocHub users have with clients, This change would improve DocHub's signage process, reduce inefficiencies, and ensure DocHub remains relevant within its competitors.

Ideation Phase

Personas

In order to start designing, we had to define who we were designing for and what needs we would be solving for different user groups. These personas are similarly based on our interviewed stakeholders, indicating a brief background of the persona, their needs as a user, their overall frustrations, how they are as a person, the skills they possess (along with their proficiency), and things that interest them.

Design Phase

Low-Fidelity Prototypes

The next step after creating sketches for our redesign was creating the Lo-Fi Prototypes for them. These prototypes were created in Figma and cover both UX Flows 1 and 2.

Testing Phase

Usability Testing Methods

User tests were conducted on:

• A creative director of a marketing agency

• A cofounder of a data startup

These users were chosen since they primarily use document signing apps for their careers. In order to test these users, we used a combination of both user observations and user interviews which gave us data on how the users interacted with the prototypes and how they felt about them.

When comparing Prototype A and Prototype B, most participants preferred Prototype B but suggested improvements. Prototype B was favored for its more intuitive dashboard layout, better-integrated search functionality, and useful Recent Documents section. However, Prototype A had advantages, such as clearer document action sections (“Needs Action” and “Waiting On”) and a more compact dashboard layout. Overall, users appreciated Prototype B’s organization but preferred Prototype A’s clarity in document statuses and action items.

High-Fidelity Prototype

After concluding our user tests, we decided to revise our low-fidelity prototypes and proceed with creating our high-fidelity prototypes, keeping in mind the feedback we had received from our users.

Revision Phase

Thank you for your time!

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