Overview

As a product design intern on DocuSign’s CLM team, I worked as the sole designer on a project centered around streamlining and supporting the conversion experience for admins and their users from the old version of DocuSign CLM, CLM.cm to the new version CLM.ds. I collaborated with the IX, Engineering, Product, UX Research, and Systems teams to design a localizable and scalable user experience that reduces product lift, eliminates tech debt, and opens access to new benefits for thousands of CLM.cm users.

Background

Why is this conversion experience valuable for users?

Sunsetting CLM.cm components from the code base accelerates engineers’ ability to innovate and eliminate tech debt by getting rid of hard to manage legacy components.

Members on the product team benefit from reduced product lift previously required to maintain two versions of the same product. Designers no longer have to provide 2 solutions for the same problem and developers no longer have to write code twice.

Lastly, for the past few years, all new CLM features have been built for the new .ds version only which means that customers on the older version aren’t benefiting from the new features and don’t have access to the latest DocuSign has to offer on CLM.

Project Journey

Design Goals

When approaching the project, some of my key design goals were:

First, to clearly communicate key account changes after conversion, such as changes in user roles, user administration, and slack integration.

Second, we wanted admins to be able to track the conversion experience across all of their groups and all of their users, and we wanted to make sure this experience is scalable across organizations, team sizes, and in the long term when conversion is able to become more automated.

Lastly, it was important that my design incorporated support experiences that help navigate the transitions throughout the conversion journey, whether that be through clarity in copy or supplementary touch points and interactions.

User Flow Visualization

As shown in my project journey, one of my first steps was really understanding the project scope, which I did through visualizations like the one below where I translated the PRD into visual documentation to help align the pain points with where they land in the flow.

Research Insights

After gaining a good grasp of the user flow and where the pain points lie within the experience, I reviewed relevant user research from a previous E-signature Harmonization project that had a similar conversion nature, and I identified a few key insights to guide my designs, the main insights being:

Concept Explorations

Once I felt like I had a good understanding of the project parameters, I iterated through lo-fi sketches to visualize potential flows and interactions.

After I had a better sense of what the flow would look like, I explored a couple different concepts for the trigger to begin conversion, experimenting with things like the trigger landing on different pages, how prominent we wanted it to be, how we would introduce access to the conversion functions, etc. After discussing with our product manager and getting feedback from other designers, we decided to move forward with the stationary page trigger!

Final Deliverable

Conversion Ready Modal

Once the admin logs into their CLM account after signing their conversion order, they’ll see this modal communicating a couple of the key benefits of converting their account.

Begin Conversion Trigger

Once the admin closes the modal, they’ll land on this conversion start page, which details a lot of the information regarding functionality impacts after converting, as well as a couple measures to confirm they agree with the changes and know what they’re committing to.

Conversion Dashboard

Once the admins officially begin conversion and log back in, they’ll land on this conversion dashboard that allows them to track the conversion progress of all their groups and individual users, informs them of account changes introduced by conversion, account details, as well as support resources for the conversion journey.

Dashboard User Tutorial

To align with the research insight that users seek more guidance, I created a more supportive onboarding experience through optional step-by-step user tutorials that outline the different features and interactions of each conversion page.

Convert Groups

This is where admins can begin converting their groups, filter by conversion status, and view any conversion notes.

Convert Groups Tutorial

The user tutorials will appear automatically the first time admins access these pages, but they can re-access the tutorials at anytime through the question icon in the top right corner.

Convert Users

Admins are also able to convert their users individually and migrate their users at their own pace according to their organization needs.

End Conversion Trigger

Finally, once we’ve verified that an account has successfully completed 100% conversion, admins will see this inline message allowing them to transition the conversion features out after 30 days.

Learnings

Final Words

Collaborating with cross-functional teams to optimize for consistency, readability, and usability.

This project taught me how to collaborate at a higher scale. This was my first experience working on a product that required high levels of cross-collaboration with specialized teams and members (IXD, Systems, Engineering, UX Research). I learned so much about communication, time and priority management, and utilizing available resources through this unfamiliar workflow.

Applying research insights to inform design decisions

Through this project, I learned the importance of research-backed insights to increase confidence in design decisions and project direction. Although my project did not include a first-hand research component, synthesizing research from previous related studies gave me the foundation to make design decisions that solved necessary problems and improved the user experience.

Communicating design rationale & incorporating feedback

Every week throughout my internship, I presented my work to my manager and product manager, our CLM design team, IX writers, Systems leads, and engineers. Week by week, I learned more about communicating the ideas behind designs and how specific details added value to the overall project, ultimately leading to a successful deliverable presentation to a 100+ person team. Beyond communicating rationale, I learned how to navigate feedback across different teams and synthesize it to arrive at design changes (something I have struggled with as a designer).

I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to learn so much in such a short span of time. This project was truly a captivating and rewarding experience that made me a stronger designer. A huge thank you to my manager Archit and everyone that took time out of their day to chat with me, make me laugh, and teach me something new.