To Become a Freelance UX Designer: Lessons learned along the journey
Last year, my full-time user experience design career that I have built in 7 years in startups and UX agencies had made my life repetitive. Eventually, I found myself in a vicious circle. To get out of this circle would be possible by redefining my career from the scratch in a way that suited my character.
Currently, I am working as a part-time freelance UX Designer and conducting my own curiosity-driven projects at the same time.
In my journey of transition to being self-employed, there were a lot of obstacles regarding being inexperienced in managing time, money, and English business meetings. Finding clients whom I work for as a freelancer and making connections for my personal projects took 2 times longer and costlier than I had planned. Moreover, I had made almost every possible mistake in the job interviews and meetings. But after having made enough mistakes, finally, things have started getting a bit better for me.
I will tell you what I have learned in this journey and how I automate my approach to freelance UX design.
Use Nielsen Norman group’s UX design career report to define your role as a freelancer
At the beginning of my decision to change my work routine, I started by analyzing what UX design is for me, and what kind of UX designer I am.
So I made a list.
- I’ve never had a desire to be a manager of a group of designers.
- I am a person who can lose interest in projects if things are not getting challenging to do or monotonous.
- I like working on at least 2 projects simultaneously. Definitely, this multi-tasking style gives me a superpower.
- After over 10 startups experience in my career, I felt an irresistible desire to design and test my own ideas firsthand.
While defining my role as a freelancer, I used Nielsen Norman group’s UX design career report as a starting point to be aware of what the latest definition of UX designer is across the world.
This is how the general UX Designer persona looks based on Nielsen Norman Research. But, obviously, the strengths of every UX professional will be different from each other. This report made it easier to decide what kind of freelance work I want to participate in and understand where my skills range is compared to the average.
For instance, I realized that I would prefer using my research and strategic skills on my personal project so, naturally, I started to pick up more visual-heavy tasks as freelance projects to stimulate my both research and visual skills at the same period.
I went through the UX skills list, checked the activities which I have conducted more than 5 times, and turned them into my freelance services.
Assess UX maturity level and product life cycle of your potential client
Usually, you can accurately analyze the potential clients in the initial chat based on 2 scales. These are the UX maturity level and product life cycle. Using them works perfectly to convince the potential client to work with you as well as to predict which steps you as a designer might have to take in this potential collaboration.
UX Maturity 0
- Probably you will have to coach your clients first and give some tips and basic information about UX.
UX Maturity 6
- Probably expectations from you as a contractor designer will be to cover a specific lack of workload in the system since the company had already had a performed UX management practice.
Market Introduction
- A lot of attempts are being made to sell demos to customers.
- The design needs of the marketing department are too much. Some product designers may have to take on these responsibilities as well.
- Usually, features from the competitors in the growth stage are inspired by.
- Must-have features are added in a hurry.
Growth
- There are too many customer support requests with design requirements. As a designer, you would most likely have been designing for a more efficient user experience such as adding shortcuts, templates, and customizable features.
- Plans for the design team would seem to be so exciting. The design system would be implemented and UX research would be done regularly. But in reality, most of the time designers have to be allocated for small fixes rather than improving on the structured process, workflow, and tools. (Probably, those won’t happen at the beginning of the growth stage.)
Maturity
- Different targeted projects may occur to be able to enter the new markets.
- In this stage, companies usually try to differentiate from the competitors as much as possible.
Conduct a heuristic evaluation on the product
Your first action as a freelance designer should be to understand the product as quickly and thoroughly as possible. One of the good resources I used for shaping my own heuristic evaluation checklist was Eight Attributes of an Intuitive UI by Everett McKay. This book has a goal-driven and systematic approach to identify the potential problems for each step of the interaction life cycle.
Here are the interaction life cycle steps mentioned in the book.
1- First, the user sets a goal to accomplish.
2- The user finds a starting point that might achieve a goal.
3- The user performs the action.
4- The user observes the action’s results to determine whether the goal was achieved as expected.
5- Finally, if successful, the user continues the next goal. Otherwise, the user fixes any problems and tries again.
For each step, we should evaluate some design attributes:
1- discoverability
2- affordances
3- comprehensibility
4- responsive feedback
5- predictability
6- efficiency
7- forgiveness
8- explorability
If you do a similar kind of analysis for 1–3 important flows of the products, you will be enough to go to the next level in the eye of the client.
Make business connections
This part of the freelancers’ reality is the most difficult thing for me since I relocated to Europe and nobody knows me here and I don’t have international work experiences either. I’ve gotten so many rejections and learned not to take rejections personally and go on my way while improving myself at the same time.
Chatting with head hunters and business people from Lunch Club and following up on job opportunities are also things I have been doing regularly.
In addition, taking part in social responsibility projects has helped me extend my network and worked as a good conversation starter with my potential clients.
Summary
Finally, I have the power to control my career’s direction and have time for my personal projects even though being self-employed brings burdens such as the urgent need of learning more about business development and self-branding.
Here is the summary of which steps I’ve taken
1- Knowing myself and deciding what I want
2- Finding ex-colleagues & mentors with whom I can prepare for the interviews and business meetings
3- Analyzing companies to be interviewed
4- Analyzing the basic flows of the product I might work on
