Imagine you just finished a project with complex business requirements, user needs, data, and user research and achieved great results. After that success, you’re now looking for your next challenge. You can’t wait to talk about your design process and success to potential clients/employers!
Remember that document you signed before you joined, called NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement)? This contract prohibits you from disclosing any proprietary information, technical data, trade secrets or know-how, including but not limited to, technology, designs, research, product plans, products, services, customers, markets, software, marketing or other business information…So pretty much everything.
So, how will you prove that you’re a designer that achieves results if you can’t talk about any past success and how you got there?
Many designers struggle with showing past work in their portfolios and interviews because of NDAs. It’s a shame to think that when you’ve signed an NDA, all the work done was for nothing. Designer, repeat after me:
I’m a designer and a designer solves problems.
NDA is simply a problem in our careers which we can find or design solutions for. In this article, I’ll detail 5 ways you can navigate around NDA when publishing your design portfolio, and how to avoid getting into this tricky situation in the first place.
To protect myself from potential troubles that can arise by helping others, I need to be clear that I’m summarizing all methods that I know of, not necessarily methods I’ve used. This does not serve as legal advice and the terms of the contract are in my own contracts. The terms of your contract can say otherwise. Please consult a lawyer and understand your contract terms before acting on my advice. I shall not be liable for any damage or lawsuit if you act on any advice in this article.
Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) is a contract that designers sign with a company before starting a project. Sometimes it’s on its own, sometimes it’s a section in an employment or Terms of Service contract.
An NDA is meant to cover trade secrets, methodologies, innovation, work-in-progress and anything that gives a company an edge over competitors.
There are different levels of confidentiality and there’s usually something about public domain. For example, in one of my contracts, this is how confidential information is defined: “Any data or information that is proprietary to the Disclosing Party and not generally known to the public.” That means, if anything is publicly accessible online, whether it’s on the company’s website (e.g. blog, features page, homepage, etc.), or a demo application which anyone can sign up to view, this info is not under NDA. Known knowledge prior to signing the contract is not under NDA either.
There is usually a clause that defines the duration of an NDA contract. In one contract, it writes “the clause related to Confidential Information will terminate 2 years from the date of termination of contract.” In another contract, the duration is 5 years.
If the NDA you signed does not have an expiry date, you’ve entered into a contract at your disadvantage. If you didn’t or couldn’t negotiate the terms, unfortunately, you will have to accept it and consider the advice in the article.
So now we understand what is covered in a typical NDA agreement, let’s look at how we can show our work when an NDA agreement is still active and if your work is not covered under public domain.
Here I listed 5 ways from most safe and easy to most “risky” (i.e. you breach the NDA but no one knows so it seems as if you didn’t).
It’s very simple, yet many designers overlook this. In the NDA, there is usually a sentence about “without Company’s prior written approval…”, which means you’re able to share the confidential information if you get the approval.
If you want to showcase a brilliant project in your portfolio, first ask the company for permission and provide a scope of information that will be shared.
You can ask about abandoned iterations and concepts, A/B testing results, and screenshots of designs in the public domain. If you want to show results related to data, usually companies are more open to sharing percentage numbers instead of actual numbers. For example, “21% increase in engagement rate” demonstrates that your work is successful, without mentioning confidential info like the number of active users.
This is the most common way to go about showing protected work. When you redact confidential information, your portfolio is focused on what you did, not whom it’s for because it is not linked to any company.
When you publish work with redacted info without company’s consent or knowledge, they may be okay with it or unhappy. However, this company cannot prove that they are indeed this company because they will be the party to give away this confidential information, not you.
There are 3 ways to redact:
Make sure to inspect the mockup carefully and redact wherever the company name appears and other confidential info such as client names, colleagues’ names, and competitors’ names.
Wouldn’t it be weird to go to an interview with a portfolio which logo is blurred and they can’t know the company name?
The most important thing you’re invited to interview for is to talk about your design process and what you know about design, not about the secrets of your previous company.
NDA is very common and in fact, likely to be in every single work contract, whether short- or long-term. Therefore, interviewers usually expect this.
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Many designers hide sensitive content under a password, or they bring the full printed portfolio to the interview. I don’t like this method nor have I ever done it. However, this method is the easiest and takes the least amount of time to prepare.
The argument is that the designer is able to control and know who they’ve given access to. With a physical portfolio, you’ll leave almost no traces of talking about confidential information of your past company.
If you want to prepare a password-protected portfolio, you can write on your website “password upon request”, and in the job application, you can write “full portfolio upon request” to let the interviewer request your full portfolio.
I’ve never gone this route because of 3 reasons:
If all your work is confidential and there is no way to go around it, or if the company specifically asked that you do not share even redacted designs, do side projects. By doing personal projects, you do not rely on commercial work to have a portfolio. Side projects can be valuable if it turns into a profitable startup or widely used product.
NDA is not a law, and you don’t go to jail if you breach it. Depending on the terms of the contract, consequences could be big or not as big as you think.
Usually, contracts write the consequence of breaching the NDA being “an injunction or other equitable relief to remedy”. It means you’ll pay the amount of the damage that you’ve caused by leaking confidential information. However, the company also has to prove:
One of my contracts with a Dutch company writes “a penalty of €25000 per breach plus €2500 for each day that such breach continues.” Basically, if you breached the contract, they just want money.
Let’s role play and see what the worst case scenario is if you have to breach the NDA in an interview.
You’re invited to an interview and you have just one former employer. Without talking about the exact process (e.g. info you got from stakeholders, how you did user research, A/B tests and results) and company name, you’re not able to present your designs in the interview. That leaves breaching NDA your only option if you want to get the job.
Say you’ve talked about all that in the interview. Now, the former employer suspects that you may be leaking the company’s design process to companies that you’re interviewing with. If they want to sue you for breaching the NDA, they have to start a case and prove the 3 points: you’ve leaked confidential information, the company is suffering damage, and the relationship between the leak and damage.
Lawsuits are not cheap, and investigation of these three things will cost the company a lot of time and resources. If the remedy they’ll get is less than the costs they’ll have to spend to win this case, it doesn’t make sense to sue you from a business point of view. Secondly, if you talked about small stuff like how you A/B tested a blue button with a green button and green increased the conversion rate by 1%, this is far from a strong example that any company can claim for damages.
If your actual intent is to leak trade secrets to another company who can earn millions from it, then you’re doing anything but reading an article about how to show your design work when an NDA is in place.
Contracts that put you at a disadvantage suck and NDAs suck. Designers should protect ourselves from these tricky contract terms that prevent us from getting better projects.
If you’re a freelancer and have more power than an employee to negotiate contracts, why wouldn’t you?
Here are 5 tips that I learned over several years of freelancing and negotiating contracts:
Let me know in the comments if you have any questions. Good luck with presenting your portfolio and now go ace that interview!
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Jenny Shen is a Senior UX/Product Designer at Toptal. She’s currently speaking at conferences, growing a UX community, and mentoring UX designers to help them succeed.