Redefining DocuSign’s voice and tone
DocuSign had evolved from an eSignature company to a suite of products. Our brand team decided in 2019 to update our look and feel. But what about our content? Our voice? We needed an update that blended with the visuals while also engaging a global customer base.
Finding our voice
With my marketing counterpart, we started by asking ourselves a few key questions.
Guiding questions:
What's the range of each of these attributes?
Where should we land?
What happens when they overlap?
Testing the range
To validate our approach and check our assumptions, we conducted an unmoderated test comparing four distinct styles:
Current
Dominant
Cutesy
Guided/clear
We aimed to answer these questions:
Which style did users prefer?
Did tone preferences differ between SMB and enterprise users?
How would users rank these styles?
The results were clear: Both SMB and enterprise users strongly disliked the cutesy style, while enterprise users also rejected the bold approach. Most users preferred our engaging/confident tone, ranking it second only to our current style.
Based on this testing, we defined our voice as conversational, engaging, and clear.
Identifying our tones
DocuSign is a suite of products with a wide range of user types, expertise levels, and global locations. I facilitated a mapping exercise with content experts across our product areas, including information architecture, technical writing, and content design.
Together we developed a learning model that would use different tones to reach both newcomers and expert users.
Drafting our tones
Once we had the mental model, we identified three tones that could meet our diverse user types. Each tone emphasized different aspects of our voice:
Newcomer: Guided/conversational tone
Skilled: Instructional tone
Expert: Concise/direct tone
A testing surprise
Our next round of unmoderated testing gave divided results. Surprisingly, even users of our complex CLM product preferred a conversational tone, while technical users gravitated toward concise, direct communication.
This highlighted our next step: we needed to tailor our tone for specific scenarios within each product.
Digging deeper
With these insights, I focused on refining our tone mapping. We discovered that scenarios, rather than just products, needed to drive our approach. Three critical questions emerged:
How familiar were users with DocuSign?
Did they bring domain expertise to the product?
What emotional states were common in different usage scenarios?
This framework proved invaluable for collecting targeted feedback from content leaders and UX writers as we refined our approach for when to use a more conversational tone and when to use more direct or instructional tones.
Training the team
After finalizing our tone guidelines, we trained our content designers. These sessions focused not just on what to do but also hands-on practice time with our new tool, Figma.
This practical approach not only boosted the team's confidence but also ensured they thoroughly understood how to apply these tones.
Newcomer: Guided/conversational tone
Skilled: Instructional tone
Expert: Concise/direct tone