8: Aviva Rosenstein of DocuSign

In today's episode I speak with Aviva Rosenstein, the Senior Manager of User Experience Research at DocuSign. We explore how to make all types of research actionable, the benefit of doing your own recruiting, and the evolution from building a usability lab to having an in-house research capability. They weren’t going to limit themselves to telling us about what was going on with sending. And I’m not going to shut those people down. I’m going to listen to what they have to say because it might be something amazing or new or super important. And of course it’s important to the customer so you don’t want to shut them down. So sometimes the scope of the study can get very quickly past where you wanted it to be, but it’s still going to be valuable so you still listen. - Aviva Rosenstein Show Links * Aviva Rosenstein * Follow Aviva on Twitter * DocuSign * API * Snowball sampling * DocuSign University * Sean McLeary * Practicing What We Preach: designing usage centered deliverables * UX Process Improved: Integrating User Insight * Advanced Communication Technology Lab (ACT Lab) * Allucquére Rosanne Stone * Radio Television Film Program * CSS * RE:DESIGN/UXD 2015 * Erin Malone Follow Dollars to Donuts on Twitter (and Stitcher) and take a moment to leave a review on iTunes. Transcript Steve Portigal: Well thank you. So let’s start broad and big as we always do and have you tell us about you, your role, your organization. Aviva Rosenstein: My name is Aviva Rosenstein. I am the head of user research at DocuSign and I’ve been here for two years. DocuSign is a rapidly growing pre-IPO startup that’s been around for over 10 years. So it’s different on a lot of ways from your usual startup. We are interested in making signing documents and digital transactions easier for everybody from consumers to large enterprises. We are very concerned with making sure that we’re trustworthy, that you can trust your digital documents with us, and so we care a lot about security. And we are more than just signing. We are looking at all kinds of ways of making that digital transaction easier. So what people think about us is oh you’re just an e-signature, but we’re actually a lot more than that. Steve: Was signing what the company started off as? Aviva: We started off as e-sign, that’s absolutely right. Electronic signature. We actually started off with a lot of real estate agents who, if you’ve ever bought a house, you know how many papers that you have to sign as part of that process and so that was a really easy set of use cases to start out with of a very motivated group of users who wanted to make that easier on their customers. But now we are doing e-sign in the whole gambit of industries and we’re moving into digital signature in other parts of the world ...