Document 3.0
Have you ever felt that documents could use some web-style template magic? Humble Paper allows you to do just that
I’ve been a developer for 5 years now and a lawyer for 10 years. Yes, odd as it may sound, I’ve actually worked with both IDEs and word processors side-by-side for many years now.
In my lawyer avatar I’ve come to be familiar with a set of steps associated with preparing a new document. It essentially involved searching amongst my emails or my hard drive (or shared repository) for documents similar to one I’d have to prepare. I’d then customise this document by removing text content that was not relevant to the current use case, and replacing names and numbers associated with the previous use case, with the current one.
If I needed to send a non-disclosure agreement to a client, I’d look for the last non-disclosure agreement I sent out that involved a similar set of facts (say, my client was a tech startup disclosing information to another company). I’d change the names of the parties involved, overwrite the ‘purpose’ clause of the NDA, change the date and that’d be pretty much it. Simple enough.
But for more complex documents, there’d be loads of stuff to customise for each situation or client. Certain clauses would be present in only specific situations, the document would be peppered with a number of different ‘variables’ that needed to be modified, etc.
Documents as code
This need to customise documents based on specific use cases led to an entire industry called document automation or document assembly starting in the 1970s. These were essentially logic-based template solutions for documents with if-then-like blocks and conditional loops producing perfect ready-to-use documents. A person, the ‘author’, would use the software to create a wizard (also known as an interview) that would incorporate all possible clause variations and variables. That wizard would then be deployed within an organisation so others, the ‘users’, could answer the questions in the wizard in order to retrieve a fully assembled customised document.
While efficient, traditional document assembly software has had only limited adoption among a large number of potential customers such as law firms, insurance companies and other document-centric organisations. Firstly, creating the wizard took a lot of upfront effort. Secondly, most solutions were expensive and difficult to justify for organisations. Thirdly, many of these products were desktop suites that were cumbersome to install and use and constructed in such a way that it took a lot of patience to complete an interview and retrieve the document.
Dumbing down document automation
For ages, many intelligent people have been predicting that document assembly, if done correctly, has the power to disrupt entire industries.
So while building out Humble Paper, we realised we had this opportunity to provide an intuitive document assembly feature as a great way to showcase our document 2.0 platform to users.
We believe that the keys to increasing adoption of a document assembly tool are to -
make the interface friendly and intuitive
use current technologies and UX wisdom to speed up the interview process
allow users to fork and share documents
continually iterate the interface and functionality based on user inputs
The First Iteration
At API World in October 2013, we launched a developer-friendly document wizard platform. It allowed developers to construct an entire document wizard using our RESTful API.
The Second Iteration — Social Documents
We soon realized that document building, when simplified had a much broader appeal and direct connect with folks who used documents on a day to day basis. It made sense for use to allow users to publish documents on our platform and then convert them to dynamic questionnaire-driven wizards.
And that’s what we’ve built in our second release.
In the meantime let us know what you think of the idea and the product. Feel free to play around with it and let your friends know about the new kid on the document assembly block. Yes, once again don’t forget to use the #documents hashtag.
