Improving the remote meeting experience on Notarize

I led the end-to-end design process to improve the user experience when multiple signers need to join a notary session remotely on Notarize.

Project Duration

Design timing: June - November 2021
Launched Feb 1, 2022 for web, iOS and android apps

The Team
I worked closely with the PM and user researcher nail down the problem we were trying to solve. I brought in the tech lead to discuss feasibility of the feature directions. The user researcher led the charge in designing the research study. The team of engineers (1 BE/iOS dev, 1 FE dev, 1 Android dev) were involved in the design process to give feedback on user experience and feasibility,

— The Context —

The Problem

22% of transactions include 2 or more signers that need to join the notary session. In our current experience, there was no way to ensure that signers would join the notary session at the same time. Once signers received an email from a business to complete a notarization, signers were expected to coordinate amongst themselves to go through the flow at the same time. This meant that the notary and the first signer to arrive would be sitting in a video meeting waiting for subsequent signers to finish their verification process before entering the meeting.

This is a bad experience for two reasons:

This wastes the notary’s time (especially contractor notaries who get paid per meeting)
It can cause an awkward experience between the notary and signer who is forced to wait on the call until the other signers arrive

Motivations to fix this now

Reduce meeting times
Helps NODs and Notarize make more money; provides a better signer experience.
In the post-Zoom era, a seamless remote meeting is table stakes
At the beginning of Notarize’s history, signers needed to be physically with one another during the video notary session. When we finally enabled signers to join the same session remotely, it was built very scrappily and the UX wasn’t intuitive. Additionally, Notarize was partnering with AdobeSign and their product team raised this as a major issue.
A more intuitive UX would allow us to enable remote signings to orgs by default
At the time, “remote signings” was a feature flag that needed to be turned on for orgs after training customers on the nuances of how the feature worked.

Solution & Hypothesis

Spoiler alert: The final solution was to build a “waiting room” where signers would wait until all signing parties were present and ready to be connected with a notary.

The waiting room will enforce more signers joining together at the same time, reducing meeting length and increasing notary and signer satisfaction

— Design Process —

First, I helped the team make sense of our current workflows.

Notarize is a very complex product so almost every project begins with a deep dive into how the existing experience works and uncovering any edge cases. There were many new faces on the team (the PM and researcher) so I created a graphic to help the team understand the different signing scenarios that were possible on Notarize. This infographic became so useful that customer success managers began pulling it up on customer calls to help explain the product.

Next, I explored two directions that had the potential to improve the meeting experience.

Direction 1: Signer scheduling

Hypothesis: If signers could schedule a meeting time, it would remove the burden of signers coordinating outside of our product and remind all signers to join the meeting at the correct time, reducing meeting time.

PROS

Signers schedule a meeting time in advance (mirroring how other virtual meetings work)
Signers can be reminded via email and text
Signers can add event link to their calendars so they don’t have to retrieve the link from their email

CONS

Signers would still be joining the meeting at different times (ex: one signer gets through the verification flow faster); although the amount of time would likely be less
It’s still possible for one signer to forget their scheduled meeting time, which would still result in wasted notary time
We didn’t have any concept of notary availability, so we would need to build scheduling tool or integrate with a third-party tool such as Calendly so we could present signers with accurate times for signers to choose from.
Would need to build email and text reminders into the product.

Direction 2: Signer waiting room

Hypothesis: Waiting room will enforce more signers joining together at the same time; reducing meeting length and increasing notary and signer satisfaction

PROS

Will prevent signers from connecting with a notary until all signers are present
Less engineering time; only need to build this on the signer side
Signers will be able to wait for other signers before jumping into the meeting with the notary
Better guarantee that signers join at the same time vs. the scheduling concept

CONS

Still requires signers to coordinate a meeting time amongst themselves

After weighing the pros and cons of each direction, the PM, tech lead and I decided to move forward with the signer waiting room.

While we wanted to build a scheduling feature eventually, this would be a much greater effort than we could allocate time for because it would involve multiple teams. Building notary availability into the product was too big of an investment and would have required a lot more planning and design effort.

Design Explorations

Current experience: First, I evaluated the entire experience for two signers joining remotely. Shown below is a description of the flow for a signer joining a meeting after they’ve completed their verification.

After signers verify their identity on Notarize, they land on this “Join Now” modal which calls the Notary

Next, they land on the “wait screen” where the signer will automatically be connected with the next available notary

Once the notary picks up the call, the first signer is dropped into the meeting and they wait for the second signer to finish verifying their identity…

Exploration 1: This version explored having the signer wait in the video meeting room, but after speaking with our tech lead, we realized we didn’t have the bandwidth to incorporate it into the meeting. However, the team all agreed this would be the ideal experience.

Exploration 2: This version removes the first modal from the flow and includes a redesign of our current “wait screen” to show the second signer’s status. Once the second signer arrives, both signers would automatically be connected with the notary.

Exploration 3: This version includes a redesign of the “Join Now” modal to make it a full screen. Additionally, I moved the current waiting screen functionality and new signer status functionality into a separate modal. The connection to the notary would automatically happen after all signers arrived. The intention was that the empty meeting room would appear behind the modal. We went in this direction because it was the least amount of eng effort and if we wanted to implement Direction 1 in the future we wouldn’t have to throw away as much code.

User Research

I built a detailed interactive prototype and worked alongside our user researcher to validate the designs.

After narrowing in on a feasible design, I partnered with our UX researcher to test the concept, as well as the usability and interactions. The UX researcher and I collaborated on a creating a study on UsabilityHub.

We tested the new Join now screen and the waiting room interactions through a series of survey questions based on design prototypes.

Waiting screen interaction

Key findings

This study provided strong validation that our ‘waiting room’ concept is an intuitive and familiar pattern for joining an online video call; several respondents specifically anticipated a ‘Zoom-like’ experience, where they’d wait for the notary ‘host’ to join and launch the meeting when all co-signers were present.

✅ 49 out of 60 (82%) participants expected that clicking ‘Join Now’ would place them in a waiting room or ‘on-hold’ status until their co-signer arrived.
“I would be put into a lobby of some sort, or even the room, stating other members are joining.”

✅ When first landing in the waiting room, 53 out of 60 (88%) answered that they’re the first to arrive

✅ 54 out of 60 (90%) expected that clicking ‘continue without others’ would initiate the meeting without co-signers

✅ 59 out of 60 (98%) understand when their co-signer(s) have arrived and when they’ve all queued up to meet with a notary

High-fidelity Designs

For web, and iOS and android apps.

Results

Decreased overall number of meetings by increasing number of concurrent signing meetings
Decreased meeting time per transaction for multi-signer transactions by 50%
Saved notary time by not waiting for other signer to join

Challenges

Because the designs required some redesign of our existing flows where the logic was messy, a fair amount of additional scenarios got uncovered as we were building. I needed to go back and account for these scenarios in the designs.

Learnings and next steps

When there are so many paths a signer can go down, you need to involve eng early and often!
Redesigning something for the better requires a lot of understanding. Oftentimes product underestimates timing because we assume we should just add a new feature on top of the existing flow, but we need to consider everything that’s already there. New features shouldn’t add more cognitive load for the user.
As a future iteration, I’d love add more delight to the waiting room — maybe some fun facts to entertain people, or a fun notary-themed game!