Improving the perception of speed when loading documents

Details

Achieved goals

• Succesfully improved the user experience by providing clear feedback and indications of the upload process.
• Consistently monitored user feedback via surveys to track satisfaction rate.
• Created a solid basis to work and iterate to contribute to the design system.

Context

Signaturit is a platform that offers digital signature and certification solutions with legal validity and seeks to improve productivity and reduce costs in companies by promoting the paperless mindset (since the analogical signature and certification process is expensive and unsustainable).

Problem

After detecting that the CSAT on the speed of the platform had a very low value, an investigation was launched to discover what made users perceive the tool as slow.

Then, after mapping all the intermediate steps between screens, we discovered that there was a serious case where the user proceeds to upload one or several files, but neither the beginning, nor the progress, nor the end of the process is indicated. This, together with the number of documents that users can upload or their size, the perception of the loading time was incredibly affected.

Side problems

On the other hand, we detected that there was no established pattern when it came to showing loading screens; some showed an illustration, others showed a Lottie File, others showed a Material UI component, all due to the technical and design debt that had been generated in the teams.

Challenge

We know that any changes we made at this point were going to be positive. However, it was decided to propose a map of releases in order to scale the proposed solutions.

Process

In a first phase of analysis, we made a map of all the load indicators that were being used in the application (specifically, we found 5 different patterns).

Subsequently, we proceeded to make the proposals to validate.

We consider that, at the point where we found ourselves, none of the solutions we were using met the expectations of usability, accessibility and scalability that the product needed.

Solution

We decided to try to standardize a new proposal that would allow us to reduce debt technical, the load of decisions by design, and offer more context to users:

We plan to test this in an incremental way; We wanted to offer the highest value with the lowest cost and resources, in this case a spinner with a personalized text for the use case.

If thanks to the tests with users we detected that the perception of the loading time was reduced, we would know that we were on the right track for a new iteration, adding illustrations.

Impact

We can analyze the impact from two points of view:

• User tests were carried out to conclude if the information displayed offered enough context in different parts of the user flow, with the general acceptance being positive, except for some details of UX writing.
• Subsequently, a second survey was conducted to analyze the impact of this change on the CSAT, and user data is still being collected. However, in the first month of implementing the changes we detected an increase in user satisfaction in terms of loading times. .

Next steps

As previously mentioned, the idea is to scale the concept to different use cases, providing not only contextual information in text, but also in a visual format, with illustrations.

To do this, work is being done on the creation of a UX writing and visual database, to have all the possible variables mapped and to be able to address changes in a more precise way in this design pattern that, although it may not seem like it and sometimes falls forgotten, is incredibly important, and adds so much value to the business.