Building the foundation of AI

Leading the Content Design team at DocuSign, I started hearing concerns and confusion on our approach to AI. I began to gather examples and found differing terms, inconsistencies and a disjointed experience.

Cost of the disconnect

Defining the issue

Rather than rush to a single solution, we needed to identify what the exact problems were. As I worked with the team and their design and PM partners I realized a few things:

  1. Lack of guidance

  2. Multiple groups solving same issue

  3. Confusion on what success looks like 

I brought this synthesis back to my team and confirmed this reflected their issues.

Aligning on principles

Before I could focus on the larger product issues, I needed to get my own team on the same page. I led the gorup to draft new principles that would be included in our content standards. There were a few key areas to include

  • AI principles content

    • When do we mention AI?

    • How do we mention it?

    • How does voice and tone adjust here?

    • What comes up most often in working with partner teams?

  • Process for review and feedback

    • What teams do we need to align?

  • Reviewing draft principles

    • Would these ideas break?

Final principles included

  • Be transparent

  • Be human

  • Focus on value

Explaining AI

We weren’t clear on what terms to use when. I identified a content designer to take lead to partner with IA, marketing, brand, globalization and legal to refine our terms. We reviewed not only what our product was doing currently but also against the roadmap and longterm vision for the organization. Beyond DocuSign, we also reviewed competitive market analysis and readability of terms to ensure users understood them.

Before

  • AI-Assisted

  • AI-Generated

  • AI-Produced

  • AI-Suggested

After

AI-Assisted

AI-Generated

Different ideas, different places

We had another issue. Every team within the product experience organization was siloing. Innovation team had principles. Design system had definitions. The content design team had principles.

All of these rules lived separately and were inconsistently applied as people created products. We needed to ensure they worked together for our products. We needed an overall point of view that everyone aligned on.

Creating a point of view

I was tasked by our leadership to lead a rapid working group to create our department’s point of view and have a presentation prepared for our CPO. The working group included:

  • Product Design

  • Design Systems

  • Content Design

  • Information Architecture

  • Research

Helping experts shine

We had the experts in the room. The issue was making the vision. I focused on setting expectations for what we had to deliver and by when, breaking it into phases, collecting existing AI information, and ensuring the teams aligned on various visual and content experiences. I also helped with reviews and updating the UI, bringing a larger product perspective to ensure experiences would be cohesive across our various product areas.

Finally, I brought all of this together in a final presentation for our Head of Design for his feedback and to ensure we could have a final deliverable for the CPO.

Before

After

Presenting prototypes

Reviewed not just principles but also example prototypes with our head of design.

We focused on solutions that worked in multiple scenarios. Aligned where we saw the brand going and how to scale visual and content for scannable experience. 

Only regret? Didn’t get to do major testing before presenting. We had a plan for user testing to review and refine later. 

Impact

This project allowed us to

  1. Clarify the foundational experience for multiple product areas

  2. Build patterns for consistency and trust

  3. Reduce user cognitive load

  4. Align entire department on overall AI experience

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