Good Practice Document Design for Electronic Signing

It is important to ensure that a document's design is planned with the recipient in mind.  It's tempting to create a document that looks visually glamorous but this should not be at the expense of clarity and accessibility.

A document that is physically printed and handed out is likely to have different characteristics to a document that is sent / completed / read / signed "electronically".   Especially as the recipient could be using one of many possible devices (phones, pad, desktop).

The following tips will help ensure that your document or form works beautifully with electronic viewing and signing:

  • Portrait not landscape.  Most people's first interaction with a document sent via email is on mobile phone.  A portrait page means the user is naturally scrolling up and down as opposed to left and right.

  • Font size.  If you are not printing the document, the font-size should be bigger than you might expect.   Depending on the font-face, used anything less than 10pt (in MS Word) is just too small.  Strictly speaking for an "accessible" document you should consider 12pt+

  • No cramming required.  As the document is not being printed, running into more pages is no problem and usually helps to make the document clearer.  So, leave plenty of space between distinct elements / paragraphs.

  • No columns.  Newspaper style columns look great in print but on a small screen the user has to scroll up and down several times per page.  Keep to one column of text per page.

  • Footer space for initials. Keep the footer clear enough for "initialing".  A lot of documents will require the user to add initials to each page - make sure there is space for this in the bottom margin.

  • Space for answers.  If the document requires the user to provide a response (free text / yes / no etc), there should be plenty of space for the response.  Think about how much text they might need to answer the question properly and allow additional room around this.  Boxes usually help make forms clearer, for example:



  • Yes / No or tick boxes?  If the user is requested to select or not select an option (for example "Do you require this additional service?"), then a space for a "Yes" / "No" response is better than a tick box.   Did they not tick the box because they did not see the question or did they mean No?  Space for a "Yes" / "No" response always ensures an intentional response is given.

  • What file format?  Ultimately the document will be converted into a PDF before it's sent for signing.  However, if you would like our support adding SignatureSense "tags" to the document, our template team will need an "MS Word" (.docx) version of the document.

If you are at the early stages of putting a new document together to work with SignatureSense we'd be happy to take a look and offer any pointers.  Just reach out to our support team.