Customer Spotlight: DocuSign

It wasn’t so long ago that businesses relied on fax machines and overnight delivery to send important documents across long distances. But over the past decade, many workflows have transitioned to the electronic realm, creating a need for fast, accurate ways to transmit information. Enter DocuSign, a company that makes it easy for people to electronically transmit contracts, financial paperwork, and other documents requiring signatures.

In 2016 and 2017, DocuSign ranked in the top five on the Forbes Cloud 100 list, which features private companies at the top of the cloud computing game. The company has won dozens of awards since it was founded in 2003; most recently, in early 2018, DocuSign Mobile won the Tabby Award for Best Business App and the inaugural Appealie Award for Best Android App.

What DocuSign Does

With more than 200 million users in 188 countries around the world, DocuSign is an essential part of business for thousands of companies and individuals who need to print, fax, scan, or send documents in an easy, quick, and secure way. Because everything is done online, the functionality and speed help users automate their workflows. Whether closing a sale, signing a contract, or approving a purchase, DocuSign’s users can access and manage their documents on any device.

Because so many people rely on DocuSign’s product for help in completing their day-to-day tasks, it’s especially important that the company delivers on its promise.

“Performance is critical for DocuSign, especially given the wide variety of documents that come through our system, with some of them having tens or even hundreds of pages. Tagging documents to be sent out for signing, as well as signing documents, are key workflows in DocuSign.”— Kiran Kaza, the Head of Mobile Engineering at DocuSign.

Central to their work is displaying a document PDF to users, which is where PSPDFKit comes in.

The PSPDFKit Framework

DocuSign first started using PSPDFKit five years ago, a relationship that grew out of a need for DocuSign to easily incorporate the PDF file format. Rather than building and maintaining a complex solution, using PSPDFKit allows DocuSign to sidestep such time-intensive tasks and still get the results they want.

Using the PSPDFKit framework not only gives DocuSign the certainty that their product works without crashing, but also the flexibility to add their “own customized logic to render tags such as signature tags, date tags, text and tags on top of a document PDF while still maintaining the look and feel of the DocuSign brand.”

And though there’s a “set it and forget it” aspect to incorporating PSPDFKit, it’s natural that problems still arise from time to time. When that happens, the DocuSign engineers can reference the PSPDFKit API documentation or easily get in touch with the team.

“We really appreciate how responsive the support team is; they are always willing to work with us to find solutions to our various use cases,” Kaza said.

“With PSPDFKit, we get that performance we are looking for to keep users focused on their tasks at hand without having to worry about the underlying technology slowing down their experience. Our team can focus on implementing the features specific to the DocuSign business domain while leaving the handling of PDFs to the experts.”