Transforming e-signatures: Introducing Acrobat Sign’s next generation e-sign experience

Business moves at the speed of a signature. For businesses, a signature represents the last mile in their journey to acquire or service customers. Each year, hundreds of millions of users electronically sign agreements. Many of these users are used to signing on paper and are signing electronically for the first time. A seamless and intuitive experience helps users easily understand agreements, fill in the required information, and complete the signing process quickly. Any friction in the user experience can lead to delays in closing the transaction or worse — losing the customer. For something so critical, e-signing has seen little innovation for the last several years — until now.

We are thrilled to launch Acrobat Sign’s next generation e-signing experience. Traditionally, e-signature platforms render agreements as images, which causes significant problems for users. In contrast, our new e-signing experience, built on Acrobat’s trusted global standard PDF viewer, renders the agreement as a native PDF. This unlocks major improvements in two key areas of the e-signing experience: streamlining agreement completion across mobile and desktop, and improving accessibility.

Since the launch of the new Sign experience, our customers have seen a significant improvement in agreement completion rates. Signers describe the experience as intuitive and polished and say it makes understanding agreements easier and speeds up signing.

Streamlining agreement completion

Signers represent a diverse range of backgrounds and technical abilities. We designed the new experience to empower the signer to confidently navigate, fill, and complete agreements across desktop and mobile devices. Let’s look at a user journey from beginning to end.

The user journey starts through an email. Building trust at this stage is crucial. Without it, users may dismiss or delete the email, mistaking it for spam. Our design prioritizes displaying the sender’s name first in the email subject that appears in the signer’s Inbox, building immediate trust. The sender’s custom branding is clearly displayed at the top of the email message inviting the user to review and sign the agreement.

Once the user lands on the agreement, we guide the signer through the completion process with intuitive navigation and clear visual progress indicators. This minimizes confusion, streamlines the experience, and helps the signer complete the agreement accurately.

After a user signs and completes the agreement, they must click “Submit” to finalize the process. However, many users unintentionally overlook this step, leaving agreements incomplete. To address this, we introduced a pulsing animation on the “Submit” button to draw the user’s attention and encourage them to complete the action.

Quickly find key information with native search

Signing an agreement isn’t just about placing a signature. When working with documents — especially lengthy ones such as contracts — finding specific information can make all the difference. We added search functionality so users can get to the details they care about easily. It’s as easy as “Control F”.

Improve page navigation

To make it easier to browse long documents — such as onboarding handbooks, training materials, etc. — we’ve included thumbnails for quick references. Instead of scrolling each page, signers can get a sense for the document’s content with high resolution page thumbnails in the right-hand pane.

Accessibility: Agreement reading and filling

With more than 1.3 billion people experiencing significant disabilities (one of every six people in the world), it is critical that digital agreements are accessible. Not only is digital accessibility an opportunity to build trust with clients, partners, and employees, but regulatory guidelines have continued to get more rigorous in this area. This is especially relevant for industries such as healthcare, education, and government. Adobe has long been a trusted leader in documents, known for creating the PDF format and leading the development of accessibility features within PDFs. As digital accessibility laws evolve, we are improving our platform to help create a more inclusive digital world.

Existing e-signature solutions reduce agreements to flat images, erasing critical formatting and accessibility tags. This turns clear, structured text into an unformatted text blob, making agreements harder to read and engage with effectively. In the worst case, signers cannot read the document at all.

Layout structure such as headings, paragraphs, and tables, which are critical for comprehension, are lost, making it hard for screen reader users to read document information or complete tasks.

Here is how our approach to accessibility solves key problems:

1. Maintaining the document structure for screen reader navigation

Most agreements include headings, paragraphs, tables, and lists — structural elements that help screen readers guide users through the content. In image-based agreements, this structure is missing or lost completely, making it difficult for screen reader users to navigate or understand the document layout.

We render agreements as PDFs, which maintains the PDF tag structure and enables screen readers to navigate and read the text seamlessly.

Animation showing a screen reader user navigating through heading and key table elements within a document.

In addition, we have built-in PDF viewer capabilities that will announce to the screen reader when user actions are taken, such as updates in processing, changes in zoom levels, and even scrolling to different pages:

Screen reader announcing document loading status. For example: “document loading under progress, document loading complete, document zoomed to 50%, etc.”

2. Preserving the correct order of form fields

When agreements have many fields to complete, it is important that the user fills them in the correct order. Many users use the Tab function to go from one field to another, so it’s important that tabbing through the document brings up each field in the correct sequence.

If not, keyboard users may jump to unrelated sections or miss fields completely. This lack of structure is time-consuming and may delay people in completing an agreement — or worse, keep them from completing it at all.

Our solution ensures that anyone using a screen reader with a tagged PDF will be presented with the fields and sections of the document in the right order, making it easy for them to complete the agreement.

Animation showing screen reader mouse moving from one section or field to the next – as senders intended the agreement to be read or filled.

3. Maximum readability with crisp, scalable text

When an agreement is rendered as an image, it tends to lose clarity when zoomed. That’s not good for anyone, but for users with low vision, blurry, hard to read text is particularly frustrating.

Our solution allows users to zoom in without losing any reading clarity. This ensures that users can keep text sharp and readable at any size so they can read it comfortably.

Using a touchpad or a touchscreen, you can zoom text in Acrobat Sign agreements without the text getting blurry.

4. Comfortable reading with support for OS dark mode settings

Many users, especially those with light sensitivity, find that dark mode reduces eye strain and makes it easier to read text. When agreements are rendered as an image, though, as they are in other e-signature platforms, the operating system can’t apply a user’s dark mode preferences, leaving documents with bright white backgrounds.

With Acrobat Sign, agreements adapt to dark mode settings. This ensures users enjoy the reading experience they prefer.

Signing experience when Microsoft Windows OS is set to “High Contrast Dark”

Every agreement you send for signature represents a customer touchpoint. With our new recipient experience, end users can now sign with confidence on any device, with a design that is accessibility-first. For more information about the features offered in the new experience, visit our help documentation.