Opening Doors with Integration and Knowing the Way with UX

Integrating with other business system APIs is an excellent way to open up your solution to other applications. Here at HotDocs, we have integrated with multiple applications, ranging from Document Management Systems (DMS) such as SharePoint to e-signature applications like Docusign.

It is all well and good to integrate with an API to provide increased functionality, but if the User Experience (UX) is poor then it won’t be used. At HotDocs we understand that not only does the integration need to work, it needs to work well. This is why we consider UX as important as the integration itself and work closely with our in-house UX team to ensure the best possible experience for our customers.

It can be time consuming and even irritating for a user if they’re trying to work with a new piece of functionality exposed from an integration, but the user interface is lacking in any feedback or the performance is really slow.

At HotDocs we regularly integrate with other applications to pull data and populate our interviews. To do this we firstly have to communicate with the other application to tell it what we want, which the application will then fetch and send back to HotDocs. This process generally takes mere seconds, unless we are fetching a substantial amount of data. In this case we keep the user informed of progress by giving feedback, enhancing the UX and providing a more positive interaction with the integration.

Documentation is the foundation of any integration. If the documentation isn’t any good then it will be very difficult to integrate with any API. Good documentation gives integrators the knowledge they need to achieve the desired behaviour using the method provided. A simple example would be returning a list of users and desired meta-data such as names or date of birth. There could be numerous ways this can be done, such as retrieving users individually or in batches. Different scenarios might dictate the methods we use, but as integrators we always investigate all possible methods to achieve the desired result and decide on the best solution. Without good documentation we cannot do this effectively and the end result would be a shoehorned solution.

Essentially, here at HotDocs we can integrate our software with almost any other system. We understand how to get the most out of each API we use to give the best possible experience to users, wrapped up in a top-quality solution.

To find out more about how HotDocs document automation software can be integrated with other business applications schedule a 30 minute demo.