Let me first say that I LOVE Adobe products. I have used Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and even Flash back in the day.

My experience with something as seemingly simple as Adobe Sign... has been horrific so far. I'm an entrepreneur, and all I wanted to do yesterday was send a test document to sign so I could see how it worked, and then send a contract to one of my first clients.

It's now day two, and I still can't get it to work. One, the service is buried, so it took me a while to figure out how to even access Adobe Sign. I didn't know if it was an app I downloaded or only available online. I did find it once, created a test document to sign, put in signature fields and date fields with the tools, and sent it to two of my emails as a test. Only one email received it (I quadruple-checked the spelling and my inbox and my spam). On top of that, when I opened the document that did get properly emailed, there was no way for me to sign it.

Adobe.com is constantly opening new tabs every time I click on any link, so in my search to figure out what I did wrong, looking for documentation on how this worked, I must have navigated away from the Document Cloud (which I didn't realize at the time what that even was).

I couldn't remember where I accessed that Adobe Sign area, but everywhere I looked, Adobe.com was telling me I needed to buy it. "But... I just used it. You're telling me I need to buy it? I'm logged in. It should know I already have this." I tried to find where it said that Adobe Sign was included in my subscription (which I did EVENTUALLY find). I didn't know if this was a glitch or I'd somehow activated a demo and it wasn't really included. I contacted customer support, got bounced through five people who all thought it was someone other specialist's problem. By the time I actually got to the final person, I'd finally figured out that it's listed under web apps, and that I DID have it, but it still didn't explain why adobe.com was still trying to get me to pay more money for something I already had.

The tech specialist gave me some resources (which were helpful). He explained there were two ways to access Adobe Sign. He asked if this was helpful and solved my problem. I honestly didn't know if it had or not. There were too many problems to even know what to ask at this point. He asked if he could close my case, so I said sure because I assumed he didn't want to sit there and wait for me to read everything.

The documentation started out great! Until it started referencing menus and screens that I had not seen, and could not find anywhere. It talked about the importance of setting up your profile and settings in the beginning, but not where I needed to actually go to access them. My screen looked completely different, with fewer options than what was in the documentation. Were they on a desktop app? Was this a difference between Mac and PC? Was this online? Were these settings specifically for Sign or generally for my Adobe account? I looked everywhere I could think to. Nada. I still have no idea where those settings are. They looked important too--things like setting up my signature, timezone, stuff like that.

I spent my whole day wrestling with this. Today, I woke up determined to tackle it. "I don't need to know everything there is to know about Adobe Sign. I just need to do another test, get that to work, repeat on my contract, and send it to the client. I can do this."

But now, when I try to sign a document (which, by the way, if I need to sign it and the client needs to sign it, why are there only two options for if I need to OR if I need someone else to sign? Why isn't there an option for us both to sign?) I just get endless "Loading Adobe Sign..." and the spinning wheel of death, which has been spinning the entire duration of while I wrote this up (and I did try things like closing all other adobe tabs, restarting Chrome, restarting my computer). This experience has been like a death by a thousand paper cuts. I KNOW it shouldn't be this difficult. My stepdad talks about how easy it is to use--that's how I found out about it. But here I am midway through day 2, infinitely frustrated, and rapidly losing confidence that I can even use this product.