Get Thinking About Digital Signatures
“Email this back with a signature”
Easy to do if you’re savvy with Adobe. Simple as: Open document in illustrator > Take an old image of your signature > Drop it into the document > Save & send.
If you’ve paid the thousand dollars for Adobe it’s easy. For everyone else, it’s a scrambling mess. Print, sign (the easy parts). Then you are either using a cell phone to take a blurry photo, avoiding your own shadow, to send a jpg or you’re running out to the office supply store to pay, with your credit card, to scan and email yourself a copy. Assuming you don’t have a scanner at home that ultimately leads to swearing.
(I had a Canon printer that wouldn’t let me scan if my ink cartridges were low…. because their brand experience team didn’t know what day of the week ended in Y.)
So digital signatures are relevant here. Some companies have you type in your name and date and hit (I AGREE). Proving, in a legally binding contract, that you are who they hope you are.
As with most things that existed before the internet, signatures exist as ubiquitous evidence of “you”. They put your physical presence, in wet ink, to a document.
The problem being: signatures come from a stick writing utensil that we are familiar with from birth. We signed our first library card when we were wee and we continue to sign for packages with a stylus. The stylus works perfectly when you have one. Styluses be not the most common accessory. Getting to the point…
What everyone does have now, is a fully captive touch screen in their pocket. We can now use this to write our signature with a finger. Our signature is really only identifiable when we write it in a manner of record. We have examples of our handwriting, but no examples of our finger writing. Also, finger written signatures are the equivalent of writing your name off-handed with lipstick. Thus those elegant signatures are done no justice by their digital finger paint twin.
Finally, we get to the point:
Let’s think about signatures as a finger gesture, unique to us and relevant to our physical sign, but adapted to a handheld touch-pad. It will look more like a gestural mark then a signature. We should become okay with this.
Two experiences seem most relevant to this situation.
- Signing on a tablet.
- Signing on a phone.
- While you’re holding it.
- While someone else holds it out to you.
These things in mind, the gesture will likely be done with a single index finger of the dominant hand. I’ve thought about a thumb signature which could be used while holding the phone with one hand, but the thumb isn’t as dexterous and is not as effective.
My thinking leads me to believe we should play with our initials as our digital signature. A couple of letters, written with the finger, on a space that can vary from 6 square inches to 80. Our initials will seem more like a mark.
My finger-initial on a screen looks like a doodle, but after repeated attempts, it becomes my doodle. My mark. My preference being for one long fluid connected gesture. Some people may lift for multiple contact strokes, some may incorporate multiple fingers for something more unique.
So start playing. Start thinking. Instead of writing your whole name out with your finger; find your mark.
Think about this for your industry and how it may play a role in what is and isn’t future proof. It’s coming, so might as well start thinking about it. Maybe not just the mark, but the way we make the mark could be recorded. Using algorithms to verify our usage of gesture, instead of the image itself.
This is a thought tool for designing user experiences and evaluating coming trends. Fingerprint scanners are great as part of a two-step verification, but I would prefer only that the fingerprint be used to allow me to send my signature, not to be captured as proof. Think of the ways approval verification is applied and how companies like Airbnb, healthcare providers, legal zoom etc could leverage the concept.
Consider also from a non-western perspective; Abugida, logosyllabic & Arabic script writing systems. They will require their own exploration. The usage of a finger to make a mark will be standard.
