Transforming the Signing Experience
A vision for the Signing and how it ties into the IAM ExperienceThe largest overhaul of Docusign’s core signing surface since 2014 – rebuilding a decade-old product into a modern, experiment-ready foundation for 150M monthly participants.
150M
Monthly unique participants👩🏻💻 Role:
Lead Designer
36%
Faster load time🤝 Team:
Product Manager, Front/Back End Engineering, AI Engineering, Accessibility Engineer,
🛠️ Timeline:
2024 – 2026
Overview
Docusign's most important surface had been frozen for a decade
Every agreement signed through Docusign — from employment contracts to mortgage paperwork — passes through the Signing Experience. It touches 150 million participants a month, more than any other surface in the product. Yet by 2024, the interface hadn't meaningfully changed since 2014. Ten years of accumulated technical debt, accessibility failures, and unresolved feature requests had turned the bedrock of the product into a liability.
Sender complaints were mounting. A 10.3-second P90 load time was alarming customers worried about conversion. An accessibility score of 65/100 meant enterprise customers were failing compliance audits. Features that users had been asking for — like keyword search within a document — had been stuck in development cycles for over two years, blocked by a release architecture that couldn't keep up.
RESEARCH INSIGHT
"I don't want to be frustrated trying to find something I know is in there. If I could just plug in keywords and find it, I'd be so thankful." — Research Participant on keyword search, a feature that took 2.5 years to ship
Why this matters
As the main design lead, I drove the product vision—contributing to early problem framing, shaping the architecture, supporting global rollout efforts, and leading design for the new AI-powered signer capabilities.
01 The Problem
A static surface, slowly falling behind
Diagnosis
State in 2024
10.3 second P90 load time (enterprise complaint priority)
65/100 accessibility score — 50+ open backlog bugs
Last major UX update: 2014
1 release every 2 months — high rollback risk
1 experiment per quarter, weeks to reach stat-sig
Keyword search: 2.5 years in development, still not shipped
State in 2026
6.5 second P90 — 36% improvement, fastest in category
98.5/100 accessibility — industry-leading, all bugs resolved
Modern, fully componentized signing surface
2 releases per month — zero customer escalations
10+ experiments per month, 1–2 weeks to stat-sig results
Keyword search: shipped, 2M searches per month
Competitive Context
Leading on 6 of 7 tablestakes capabilities
When we audited the signing experience against competitors in early 2024, Docusign was leading on only 3 of 7 core capabilities. By 2026, that had become 6 of 7 — with a clear roadmap for the seventh.