Working on a confidential project or an unfinished product, you should include an NDA to ensure the participant doesn’t reveal any critical information before the release.
It's worth keeping in mind that when running public user testing on Engage, you are talking to individuals from all over the world. These testers are not directly controlled or employed by Engage. We simply connect you to them so that you can hold a productive conversation and run effective research. If your company needs to have extra legal protection, we recommend creating a simple 1-page NDA and asking the tester to sign this before or at the beginning of the session. In this guide, we'll cover how to approach and handle NDAs with Engage.
1. Let your users know
The first step is to let your users know about the NDA requirement in the project description and make sure to include an additional question in the screener. You can use something like this:
Are you willing and able to sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) before the session?
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I agree to sign an NDA (accept)
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I do not agree to sign an NDA (disqualify)
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I'm not sure (disqualify)
2. Create an NDA
Non-disclosure agreements (NDA) are legal contracts that prohibit someone from sharing information deemed confidential. To goal is to keep as simple and short as you possibly can while meeting a few necessary formal requirements. Check out our 2-page NDA for UX research template.
3. Use e-signature for signing
There are a bunch of free and paid solutions for the signing part. You can use DocuSign, PandaDoc, SignEasy, etc. and most of them will have shareable links you can send to your participants directly. We'll cover using a free service, SmallPDF in this guide.
4. Ask your users to sign the agreement
After you have all three things down, you'll need to ask your scheduled participant(s) to sign the agreement. The best way to go about this is to send an email with your preferred signing solution and required steps well before the scheduled start time. You can check the email addresses of your scheduled participants by clicking on their names (profiles) in the Scheduled sessionslist.
With SmallPDF, you'll need to attach the PDF to the email. For this you can use and modify our template below:
Hi there,
We're excited to talk with you about our new project on Engage soon but as we've mentioned during the screener we are not ready to go public with it just yet. Because of this, we'll need you to sign a Non-disclosure agreement (NDA) before the session.
Here are the few steps you'll need to do for this:
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Please download the attached PDF agreement
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Read carefully and don't be afraid to ask if anything is not clear or you have follow-up questions.
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Navigate to SmallPDF E-sign: https://smallpdf.com/sign-pdf and upload the PDF.
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After uploading, use the 'Create a signature' button to draw your signature and place it onto the document.
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Download the PDF with the now attached signature and email it back to us.
Please keep in mind that this is required to participate in the study. We'll have to cancel the session if we don't receive the signed PDF 5 hours before the scheduled start time.
Let us know if you have questions or need any help with this.