How to Deal With NDAs When Creating Your UX Portfolio

Sarah Doody (00:00)

So the topic of NDAs in UX portfolio is honestly one of the top ones that I am asked. Maybe you are listening to this and you’re thinking to yourself, I have done all this amazing work, but I fear I cannot include it in my portfolio because of NDAs and agreements with your current or previous employers or maybe even freelance clients if you have been doing that. And it’s especially common for people with.

five, 10, 15, 20 or more years of experience who’ve been at a lot of different companies for a long time. And the longer you have worked in this field, the more likely you have some of your work locked in quotes under an NDA. So today I wanna give you some ideas for how maybe you could show that work and tell the story of that work sometimes without actually literally showing deliverables, et cetera.

So first I wanna think about what does an NDA actually mean, right? Versus what you think it means. Now, I am not an attorney. I just wanna get that out of the way first. But I will say that most NDAs or non-disclosure agreements restrict you from sharing proprietary data, maybe screenshots of unreleased products, classified information, or maybe even client-specific information, right?

always restrict you from talking about what you did, talking about your process, talking about why you took approach A versus approach B when it came to user research, for example. And NDA doesn’t prevent you from thinking about your thinking, your approach, and the type of problems you solved. And the portfolio, it’s not just about showing the final screens. I know this because every single month,

I’m having conversations with recruiters and hiring managers about what they are looking for. And they do not say, I only want to see the final screens. What they say is they want to know why you made certain decisions. They want to understand how you think. That is what they want. I will link to some episodes I’ve done with my interviews with recruiters and hiring managers in the show

So if you’re like me, you learn best through examples. So I wanna just give you an example of what we could do to handle a scenario where maybe we worked on a project that’s under NDA, but we still wanna include it in our

All right, let’s imagine for the past three years, you have been working at NASA and you’ve been working on some type of internal tool and you can’t show that interface. That is just some of the rules of working at NASA. But what you can talk about is the fact that you redesigned an internal workflow used by 200 researchers.

and you ran 15 stakeholder interviews to identify the core pain points that these researchers and scientists had that you reduced task completion rate time by 40%. See what I did there? Just in that sentence, I never mentioned NASA, right? So in your portfolio, that could be one or two slides where you’re talking about this internal workflow you worked on used by 200 researchers.

Maybe you could even say working in aerospace or something like that if you want to also add in the industry. And then I shared a little bit about what I did, right? I said, ran 15 stakeholder interviews to identify core pain points. And ultimately we reduced task completion rate by 40%. That would be a good setup in a portfolio project or a case study where you are telling people what you did, who was using it,

And then the remainder of that case study could go into some of the details such as, well, why did we even need to do this research to begin with? Was there a problem that caused us to start to go down this path? ⁓ Why did we decide to do stakeholder interviews versus some other type of research, right? ⁓ What were some of the core pain points that people were experiencing with this internal tool? And

How did we know we reduced task completion rate by 40 %? There was obviously some type of usability testing. How many people did we decide to test with? Maybe what software did we use for that testing? Was it remote? Was it in person? Was it moderated, unmoderated? So you could still talk about that project without ever mentioning that it was for NASA.

You can describe your problem, your approach, the methods you used, and the outcome without also showing a single screen. The point of this is that you need to rethink the assumptions you’re making when it comes to NDAs because chances are you can still talk about what you did without literally showing the screens or mentioning the specific company.

And I’m a user researcher. If you’ve known me for a while, you know that I’ve been doing user research and product design since the early 2000s. And when I look at the problem of UX people struggling with their portfolios because of NDAs, the researcher in me has a couple of conclusions. And one of the big ones is that for a lot of you, the NDA isn’t the actual blocker.

The real blocker to you adding that project to your portfolio is the uncertainty of how to tell the story of that project. Because you have frankly been brainwashed into thinking that your portfolio must include pixel perfect, beautiful screenshots and images of journey maps and screens and whatever that you made. That is not true. That is nice to have sometimes, but

As I said in the beginning of this, recruiters and hiring managers wanna know how you approach decisions, how you approach problems, et cetera. They wanna see the messy middle. They’re just not looking for this perfect project on a pedestal. So the NDA is not the real blocker. It’s that you don’t know how to talk about what you did. And when you don’t know how to structure a UX case study, the NDA becomes a convenient excuse

to avoid adding that project to your portfolio, right?

Maybe in thinking about your own portfolio, you have one, two, three, five, 10 projects you’ve worked on that you did not even include because you were worried about NDAs, right? But the fix is to rethink how we think about NDAs because NDA doesn’t always mean never ever ever are you allowed to include this. It just means we need to rethink how we look

at including the projects. Now, other things to think about, really practically speaking, when it does come to visuals and things like that, you could potentially redact, blur, change content in interfaces, right? You could blur out the logo, you could swap out the content so real customer names are not displayed, for example, hopefully you’re doing that anyway. ⁓ You could be cropping.

cropping visuals, right? Cropping screenshots, blurring part of a screenshot, blurring part of a user journey map or something like that. But if you are going to include visuals from projects you worked on, you can get creative about how you show parts of those interfaces without revealing the whole thing. Let’s imagine this internal tool for NASA. There was a lot of stuff going on in it, but maybe one thing you worked on,

was some type of ⁓ filtering system for, I don’t know, ⁓ tickets in some type of ⁓ bug tracking system. Obviously, I’m making this up. Now, maybe you focused on just that filtering system. Okay, we don’t need to see the entire interface. You could frame that case study just around those

So you have the whole interface, maybe you’re blurring some of it, but then you kind of zoom into those filters so we can really see those filters because that is kind of the heart of the case study. So we need to get creative about how we are showing visuals and learning how to write UX case studies that are focusing more on our process and not the product.

So if you are stuck with writing your UX case studies or not even writing them yet because you feel like you don’t have any projects to include because you feel like all of your work is under NDA, I have a couple of quick things for you to do. Number one, if you have a good relationship with your boss or manager from that company, you could potentially go back to them and say, hey, I just have some questions about this NDA. Does that mean I can never, ever, ever

show this or talk about this under any circumstances? Or is there flexibility? For example, does that NDA mean, sure, you can talk about it in interviews, you could put it in a case study presentation deck, but you’re not allowed to put it on a website because, for obvious reasons, when you put information and images and texts on a website, they become searchable in search results and now AI, et cetera, right?

So it could be that companies that maybe you have NDAs with for your projects, they don’t want their projects, the details of those projects coming up in Google search results and stuff like that. But if you were to clarify what that NDA means, you might find out, yeah, it’s fine to put it in a presentation. We just don’t want it on a

If you’re listening to this episode and you’re thinking, wait a second, did she just say my portfolio doesn’t need to be a website? Yes, I did. Your UX portfolio does not need to be a website. can absolutely be a presentation. I have seen this work for people in over the decade that I have been focusing on career strategy for UX and product people.

They are getting hired with UX portfolio presentations, not websites. So that is action step number one. If you have a good relationship with your boss, current boss, former boss, whoever, go back and clarify maybe what that NDA means. Then get to work on your case studies. If you’re struggling with your case studies, I have a free UX case study template that walks you through exactly how to structure the case study for a project.

so that it answers the questions recruiters and hiring managers want to see. I will put it in the show notes for you. And if you want more help with your UX job search beyond case studies, whether that’s applying your resume, LinkedIn, networking, negotiating, et cetera, you may wanna check out the syllabus for my UX job search coaching program called Career Strategy Lab. I will also link that in the show notes in case you need more help.

than with just your portfolio. All right, that is all I have for today. So don’t let NDAs be the reason that you sell yourself short by not including projects in your portfolio. NDAs do not always mean never ever can you talk about it. You just have to get creative about the story you are telling and any visuals you are including. All right, I’ll see you on the next episode.