Dear docuSign,
Let me explain to you how you wasted an hour of my time today.
First, let me explain that I love your product. It’s fantastic. In fact, I’m taking the time to explain to you how you could improve your “fit and finish”.
Part 1
My legal department signed something and forwarded it to someone else for signature. They CC:’ed me.
Instead it included the text “[redacted] sent you a copy.” which I ignored because right below it was:
REVIEW DOCUMENT
…then…
Tom Limoncelli, Plesae docuSign [name of file].pdf" Thank you, [name from my legal department]
What would you do? You’d click on the link and try to sign …ummmm…. docuSign it. Right?
Me too!
So being a good corporate citizen I clicked on the “REVIEW DOCUMENT” button and was surprised that there was no button to click to sign the document.
Now I wasted 5 minutes trying to figure out how to sign …ummmm…. docuSign it. There was a “CLOSE” button and an “OTHER ACTIONS” menu. The menu had nothing useful. I clicked “CLOSE” and was told, You’re done! Thanks for using docuSign. After all recipients finish signing, you will receive an email with alink to the document."
“Wait,” I thought to myself, “That can’t be right!” I didn’t sign it. How can it say that I’m done?
So then I wasted 5 minutes explaining this to my contact in my legal department (and I assure you, her 5 minutes is a lot more expensive than my 5 minutes) and she explained that I was CC:’ed and I didn’t actually have to do anything.
Oh.
The email I got should have said, “This is being CC:’ed to you. You don’t actually have to do anything.” However it didn’t. It literally misdirected me by saying, “PLEASE DOCUSIGN THIS”.
So…
TOTAL TIME WASTED: 5 plus 5 plus 5 = 15 minutes
Feature request: When someone is CC:’ed, don’t misguide them and ask them to sign …ummmm…. docuSign it! You’re already generating custom text ("[redacted] sent you a copy"), why not change the “Please docuSign” to “You’ve been CC:ed on this. You don’t have to do anything. However you can click on the link to review the document. You will not be given the option to sign.”
Part 2
Well then I figured I should report this. I like docuSign and don’t want this bug to go unfixed. Certainly I can’t be the only person that gets misled. Certainly docuSign cares about the user experience of newbies… I mean casual users… like myself!
So I searched around to find out how to file a bug. Well that required creating an account on your system.
Now I’m all about security. So I use a password manager. It generates extremely long, difficult-to-guess, passwords any time I go to create an account.
However, your account creation process intentionally evades such things, so the extremely long, difficult-to-guess, password that was created was lost. Most websites are written by lazy programmers that decide not to fuck with password managers. (Did I say “fuck”? I’m sorry. I meant “evade”). However you’ve decided to spend extra time and effort just to fuck with password managers. I think this extra coding time could have been spent on more important things like… properly generating text to people that are only CC:ed on contracts. But what do I know about security? I digress.
Anyway…
The long and the short of it is that now I need to go through the password recovery process.
At this point I realize that I’ve wasted 30 minutes trying to give you feedback. This feels like a great waste of time because why would a company fix a problem that only affects people that don’t pay for your product?
TIME WASTED TRYING TO OPEN A BUG: 45 minutes
Part 3
That’s when I realize it would take me less time to write this blog post than to figure out how to file a bug.
TIME WASTED WRITING THIS BLOG POST: 15 minutes
Part 4
I don’t understand why you require my phone number to create an account. Just kidding. I know why. You’re going to wait a few days then have a salesperson call me to see if I want to sign up for the paid version. Ha! I fooled you! My company already pays for your product! You could have determined that by looking at my email address! However that would have taken a lot of extra time and your developers are busy writing JavaScript to evade password managers.
Don’t worry. I look forward to the phone call. I’m going to keep them on the phone for a good long time.
By the way…
I have screen shots and stuff that I’d be glad to share with you. Contact me at tal at what exit dot org.
Update: 2018-05-02 It has occured to me that the “file name” might be
literally Plesae docuSign [name of file].pdf in which case this is not
docuSign’s fault. However, if this is true, then docuSign needs to visually
indicate that this is a filename.
