EasySign: Can I or can't I modify filled fields?!

Question

Is it just me, or is Acrobat EchoSign a user-hostile piece of garbage? I am using Reader 10.1.3. Below is a form I'd love to fill out and perhaps "sign" with a TIFF of my signature, but first I have to type in some fields. Getting to this point took me 20 minutes this morning:
(Sorry about the furry JPEG; Adobe Forums only passively informed me after I tried saving to three non-antialiasing "content types" that it would only accept the JPEG.)
If you will look at the name field under the "YOUR INFORMATION" section, you'll see three blue blotches reflecting three multiple-selections of zero-length text area boxes from the list at the right. Those objects are the result of my patiently left-clicking the I-beam over my name in an effort to modify the text I've entered in each field. Each time I did so, I would briefly see a blip appear under the I-beam, but it would not allow me to edit my text. The blip, of course, was a zero-length text area box being created. I persisted because at one moment I swear I did see an arrow icon and it let me make a blue selection over one patch of my text, but then for some reason when I typed nothing happened, and then the apparition vanished and I could not repeat it. And it was only after a few minutes, when in frustration I started playing with right-clicking over a text field, that I discovered the "Comments List" so useless to me.
There are now dozens of these mini-boxes all over the sheet (just look at how the "Comments List" has 86 entries instead of the 12 that actually contain text). But this means I can't edit something once I've finished a text, doesn't it? If so, why not? Why is it not clear to me, a sophisticated user? Why the bizarre and unpredictable behavior? Or am I some kind of idiot, not having found the correct incantation? Perhaps one of Adobe's priestly programmers or myriad sycophants will now enlighten us all, tacitly suggesting that it's merely my stupidity, for They Knew the Blessed Secret Their First Time.
I've searched pretty exhaustively for a solution to this and so far have found nothing, but perhaps that's because I've only budgeted 45 minutes for this would-be simple task. Am I going to have to pull this file into Illustrator, or print it out and mail it?
Twenty or so years ago, I was probably the first or second person outside of Mountain View to be shown the alpha of Carousel. Since that moment -- and despite having held out hope numerous times -- I still can't easily fill out a document online without heartache. Why can't I edit a field? What am I going to have to do when I want to modify a multi-line field? My workarounds over the years have run the gamut of every possible thing you can imagine, from scanning into Photoshop or Illustrator or Quark or InDesign; to blind fields and double-exposures on a laser printer; to glue; even to hacking the fields into the PostScript with setfonts and movetos and shows.
I've spent 40 years in the graphic arts; half of them I've wrestled with Acrobat, on some pretty complex work products having features of debatable benefit when shoehorned into PDF format. When it comes to the simple single-page monochrome Letter/A4 form -- the most abundant portable document on Earth -- we are now in Acrobat v10 and all I want to do is easily fill out a form and sign it and e-mail it back and I still can't.
Why is life so much harder now than when I could run this through a typewriter, Adobe? What are you really doing about it for the billions? How much more of our lives' valuable moments are you going to squander?
(P.S. What a difference almost a day makes: Hours after beginning this -- and just before submitting this article -- I myself have discovered the incantation with a few minutes' further experimentation over the many already expended. I can now recreate the arrow and edit the field. It is actually not difficult, but it is far from obvious and it is the furthest thing from good UI technique. Nevertheless, I now Know The Blessed Secret, or at least one part of it. But it does not change my position above. Can you surmise why, O Adobe Priesthood of Insufferable Sanctimony? If it takes a seasoned programmer hours to learn out the combination, what makes you think Grandma and Grandpa are ever going to figure it out?)

Answer 1

You do it unconsciously; we are all forced into these mentalities by our circumstances. But all three of you experts were wrong about who listens, at least when you pray as loudly as I do:
On Sat, Sep 1, 2012 at 2:18 PM, Kevin M Lynch <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Peter,
This is Kevin M. Lynch and I run the Acrobat & Document Services business at Adobe (coincidentally our CTO is also named Kevin Lynch, but I’m not him - I run the document business). 
I saw your forum post (http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1058887) and want to apologize for the difficulties you’re having filling out and signing a form.
It’s certainly our intention to make this a very easy process so I’m glad you went to the trouble to let us know that it was a frustrating experience for you.
Frustrating to me, but mainly because it is no doubt frustrating for (literally) billions of others less sophisticated than me. That is my main concern, and the ball I keep my eyes on. I feel terribly sorry for them.From what I can gather, you had no problem knowing where to go and click the “Sign” panel on the right and then clicking the add text button (and let me know if otherwise).
Well, that's a separate issue. I intuited that it was what I might need to fill out a basic form. But most people won't get even that.
But then there were two issues that prevented filling out and signing the form from being drop-dead easy:
1)      After adding text the first time (which was hopefully easy – let me know if not), you couldn’t go back and correct it.  Every time you tried, you ended up inserting a new blank text block.  It would have been much nicer if we had a wider selection range so that if you clicked anywhere near a field that was already added we just selected it and allowed you to edit it.
I don't know about the width of the selection range; it seemed to me that there was *no* selection tolerance. I was rolling all over the text looking for it to catch and it wouldn't, hence 75 null textareas. (Possibly the cursor just was refusing to change from I-beam to arrow, I reasoned, and clicked, but did not get into an edit mode.) My sense is that it was not going to give me an arrow no matter where I went. My workaround (which few of your millions will be patient enough to discover) was forcibly exit the I-beam mode by going to the "Place Signature" mode and then re-enter the "Add Text" mode, which then readily showed me an arrow whenever I rolled near/over a textarea, and then let me click into the textarea and modify it.
I'm not on the subject machine. I'm on a brand-new laptop now and just upgraded its Reader from the factory 10.0.0 to 10.1.4 to get EchoSign and see if I can reproduce it here. On the same document, I appear now to be able to roll over created textareas and click the I-beam over them and get in. So it's not a global issue. The exhibiting machine is, I think, a Lenovo with Windows XP, but I will have to check this. If you need specific installation information to help isolate, please tell me what you need.
But I'm seeing some wrong behaviors even now:
While in "Add Text" mode (even when appearing to function properly, as on this installation), the elongated I-beam cursor does not morph to anything else as I roll over, so there is insufficient feedback prompting me to know I can modify the field.
This is inconsistent with what I experience when I escape "Add Text" mode. (I find I can escape "Add Text" either by entering "Insert Signature," as I note above, or in another way, by manually closing the editing palette by clicking its close box.) When I move out, I appear to be in a free-cursor mode; it now prompts me with a change to an arrowhead cursor whenever I roll over a textarea, and then it puts me into something unexpected called "Typewriter" mode (the only surface indication of the difference is that a lozenge in the editing palette now says "Typewriter" instead of "Add Text".
It is altogether unclear the functional difference between "Typewriter" mode and "Add Text" mode, or the purpose of having two different identities for two modes that seem to share some functions. Their behavior, however, is different enough to cause confusion. This could be streamlined quite a bit.
Editing text (new or modifying) in either of these two text modes appears to be operating one pixel below the finished text after repainting.
2)      You couldn’t add a TIFF image as signature.   I’ll have to have my team look into this as I can add one without any problems on my system.  However, like you, I don’t understand why we don’t have both TIF & TIFF in the filter so I’ll have to follow up with my team to see if there is any reason for that.
This may also be local to that machine I was on Friday. When I return to Chicago I can check this, if it's important to you and if you are confident that doing so will bear fruit.
Am I correct in that those were the two issues or were there others?  Once you went off the beaten path into comments you could see that we use the commenting capability, but our intent is to have it easy enough that you would never go there.  If it helps to clean up your document, you can select each blank comment  in the right side panel and hit the delete key to get rid of them.
See above, which gives you some more information. As you can glean from between all of my acerbic comments, I felt that the user experience was in many places carelessly thought through. You provide another case in point above, speaking of "Comments" mode. The three modes -- "Add Text," "Typewriter," and "Comments" -- obviously are genetically related. Their respective purposes become indistinct and confusing to the casual user. The basic shift from mode to mode is confusing; tool depth level and state are uncertain; use metaphor for each tool is nonstandard, inconsistent, and counterintuitive; visual feedback is lacking or inconsistent; and I think in some generals and some specifics each tool's entry point and interface needs to be reworked. I realize that you're constrained by the Reader API UI, so you don't have infinite flexibility, but there are still some basic things you can do.
Even with a working installation as I have here, it is confusing. On my View menu, I have two "Sign" and two "Tools" items. Why? I can't seem to find how to get back into "Typewriter" mode. What is it? Where is its entry point? Is it part of Sign or is it part of something else?
Form filling could use some user workshopping to figure out how to make it intuitive. Starting from the top, ideally, Acrobat Forms, if implemented in a document, should be user-seamless with EchoSign. Whether a document is forms-enabled or not, ideally the tools should have the same look and feel. I am skeptical about that being easy. But George Johnson raised the point that you now have two distinct products serving (from the user's perspective) identical purposes. If Reader is going to be user-centric, that proposition needs to be taken into account right away. Starting with that, a universal text editing palette for both Forms and EchoSign (whatever the underlying difference) might be in order. Distinguishing among text "in stone" (the immutable background PDF); malleable superimposed text fields and images (e.g., signature); and comments needs to be treated.
If I were god, just off the top of my head, tomorrow I would open all Acrobat documents by default in a basic "Add Text [e.g., fields and comments] or Image [e.g.,signature]" mode with a universal text-cum-graphics palette, similar to what you have but switchable within between text and image (consider PageMaker's old universal palette, dumbed down). If forms-enabled, the text palette would be activated and the cursor inside Field 1 ready to type. If not, you have an I-beam as the default. You could switch to Image mode within the palette and the palette would provide a signature subfunctionality (including EchoSign's capability of retaining as default signatureStamp), or other image type. Maybe outside that mode is panning and zooming, maybe panning and zooming are hierarchically equal to those two modes. I at least believe that the key to this is that text / comments // signatureStamp / images should now be as basic to Reader as pan/zoom. How to make those two modes intuitively switchable by the grandparents is probably not so tricky, but I would have to think about that a bit more.
I appreciate the time you’ve already taken to struggle through this and provide feedback.  I personally want to eliminate the need to print out, sign, and fax back these stupid forms!
You and a few billion others. Thanks for the prompt response.
Regards,
Kevin