The signup form is the part teams look at, because it is the part they built. The verification email is the part they configured once and never watched anyone wait for.
What to put in the public brief
- That they will create a real account with an email they control
- Desktop or mobile, explicitly
- That a screen recording is required
- Roughly how long, including waiting for the email
- Whether social sign-in is in scope
Keep the URL and any invite code private.
What to put in the private instructions
Say to start the timer at the first click
And to keep recording through the email wait. The dead time is data: four minutes of nothing is a finding, and it is invisible in every analytics tool you own.
Ask them to report where the email landed
Inbox, promotions, spam, or not at all. Ask which provider they used, because deliverability is provider-specific and one bad answer is not a pattern.
Ask them to get the password wrong first
Deliberately, once. Rules revealed only on failure are among the most common causes of abandonment and they never appear in a funnel.
Ask what they expected to happen next
At the moment after verification. If the answer is not what your product does, you have found the gap between promise and landing.
Proof worth requiring
Ask for
The full recording including the wait, a screenshot of where the email landed, and the email provider.
Do not ask for
The account credentials. You do not need them, storing them creates an obligation you did not want, and you can verify the account exists from your own side.
When this task type is the wrong tool
If people sign up fine and then leave, the problem is after this boundary — run an onboarding test instead.
If your verification email is not arriving at all, fix deliverability before paying anyone to observe it. You will get fifteen identical reports and learn what a spam-folder check would have told you free.