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Envelope Preview should honor email message formatting.

Related products:eSignature
  • November 13, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 80 views
  • kim.ayers
    kim.ayers
  • Hengfeng Ge
    Hengfeng Ge
  • mshealy
    mshealy
  • mr1

  • Conversation Starter
  • 6 replies

At present the when opening an envelope to action it e.g. the email body section only allows html formatting.

However, most business users will not format messages using long strings of html, instead they are likely to use just plain text editing.

And so the message is displayed as one continuous line of text: e.g.
 

Message body in Envelope preview

The above message if formatted correctly in the notification email (even in plain text) and before signing.
 

How the message should be formatted.


Possible fixes:

  • always display text formatted in the preview
  • For larger messages truncate the text and have a ‘show more’ or ‘show message’ button that displays the message in full.
     

Even better yet:

  • Allow rich text formatting of the message (like for this post and in most email clients) in the first place and then convert that to HTML, if required.
    • I’m guessing this might play a little bit of havoc with plain text based email clients - but you seem to be promoting html usage anyway.

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  • Author
  • Conversation Starter
  • 6 replies
  • November 22, 2024

Stating the issue a bit more explicitly - perhaps I was a bit brief above (when provided as a reference to DS support on a customer ticket - we ended up diverted onto an API tangent).

Step 1: Envelope is created and sent

A sender creates an envelop with a ‘nicely’ formatted message

 

Step 1b: The signer receives the email notification - but the generally, don’t act on the email.

The email message is ‘correctly’ formatted.

 

Step 2: The Signer processes their inbox in eSignature

Signer has actions to process from home screen
Signer chooses to preview the envelope in eSignature


Step 3: HERE LIES THE ISSUE
This message is not formatted

  • “unless” all the formatting in html - as one long line (to keep email and signing formatting consistent).
    • This is an unrealistic expectation on the sender, who is a (general) business user
This message is not formatted ‘correctly’

For long or complicated messages, the text displayed is not readable by a normal person.
This makes previewing open actions much slower - since you need to open the signing experience to preview the message.
This is a complaint received from upper level management (enterprise CFO, CEO), more than once.

Step 4: Signing

Message is ‘correctly’ formatted here.

There is a potential separate PROBLEM here, namely:
This message is only displayed once (at the start of signing) to signer.
Often these messages can contain notes for CEO/CFO level users to refer to specific parts of the contract.  They need to be able to go back an forth between the message and document(s).
I seem to recall this was not always the case, but perhaps I am mistaken… and this is likely a problem for another day.