12 things I learned during my first 12 months as a Freelance UX Researcher
Exactly one year ago, I left my previous company, resigned from my role as Head of User Research, and decided to work as a freelance UX researcher. In the last twelve months, I got the chance to work for small startups and global corporations, both in B2C and B2B environments. This article is a summary of what I have learned so far, and the mistakes you should avoid if you decide to go freelance as a UX researcher.
Your “services” website does not matter. Clients have unique problems and want to know if you can help them. 🤷🏻
After deciding to work as a freelancer, I immediately started building a website including the services I wanted to offer: Qualitative and quantitative research, but also general UX consulting, and individual mentoring. I sure thought that clients would get in touch with me based on what they have read on my website, in case my services matched their needs.
After one year, I honestly have no idea if any of my clients had ever visited my website. At least, no one mentioned it. Instead, I was approached by recruiters or team leads with clear needs, for example We need someone to grow a UX research team to support the discovery and development of a B2B platform for a global client. Are you able to help us? or they request quantitative research mentoring for their team members, or they need a strategic user researcher to investigate our way of communicating our brand values.
As a freelancer, you are a flexible short-term Swiss army knife to help them solve problems that companies can not solve themselves with their own existing staff. You are expected to apply specific skills and different perspectives to a unique problem and help them solve it.
Every company is different, their products and services are different, and their target audiences are different — so you must be able to adapt, no matter what is written on your website.
You have more freedom to break silos and bring people together. 🤝
As companies grow, silos grow. The more hierarchy levels get introduced with Leads, Heads, Directors and VPs, the more difficult it will become to align with peers from other departments. Their KPIs might be different, and their processes and tools might be very different from yours. So the larger a company, the smaller your individual circle of influence, compared to the global scale of the business.
Corporate complexity makes it very difficult to solve complex problems that require the collaboration of multiple departments and business units. This is where things get slow and inefficient. This is where people start complaining. And potentially, this is where you as a freelancer come in. The hope that you will speed things up will allow you to apply a higher flight level to your work. People will try to open doors for you and help you be successful. It is very likely that you will enjoy more freedom of movement than many employees in the team.
This is your chance to (re)build bridges between people and teams, identify shared needs and concerns, suggest more efficient ways of working, combining multiple projects into one.
Clients love you for addressing the elephant in the room. 🐘
Being fully employed in a company will sooner or later make you adapt to the company culture. You will behave according to your boss's expectations, you will follow the company vision, wear corporate hoodies, and the more you surround yourself with people who look at the same topics from the same perspective, you will slowly stop thinking outside the box. You might have seen colleagues around you raising their voices and strongly disagreeing with the management. How did that turn out? It can be safer to keep quiet and not risk your next promotion.
As a freelancer, you are expected to bring a different perspective to the conversation. In fact, people will love you for addressing the elephant in the room. Chances are high that many people agree, but you are the first one to ever speak out that something is wrong here. You will know by the nodding and private glad you said it messages in your chat window.
It is easier to agree with a critical voice than to be the critical voice. For you as an external expert, flagging the obvious will boost your credibility within the company. You are the only one who has the mandate to be absolutely honest. Use it!
While drowning in data, many companies have no idea who their consumers are. 📊
You will be surprised how little even world-class market leaders know about who their customers are and what they care about. On a regular basis, I have conversations with people from product and design departments who ask me to investigate very fundamental questions about what users find interesting, and what they expect to see along different steps of a journey. Don’t get me wrong: I am super happy that major players in their business ask these basic questions, I was just assuming that they should know all of that by now, given the amount of available data and pure size and power of the company.
Before working as a freelancer, big brands blinded me a bit. Now I know that the size and popularity of a brand is not an indicator of customer centricity, nor is it a predictor for sophisticated user research practices. You should never hesitate to accept an offer from even the biggest brands. Chances are that some people in their product teams lack even an understanding of their target audience, people’s needs, motivations and expectations. And your work can create huge value for these teams, and ultimately for the users.
You will constantly find yourself in situations outside your comfort zone. 😰
I have learned so much in this short year, simply because I was constantly pushed into unknown territory, trying to find a way through the jungle. In the last twelve months, two of my clients were global corporations. Their company structures are incredibly complex up to the point where internal team members were not aware of people who are working on a similar topic. I had to address inefficiencies and lack of alignment in conversations with senior directors who I barely knew. I had long fights with internal insights teams who did not like the fact that I was there, I spent days arguing with Sales teams who refuse to let us speak to our B2B customers. Never before had I been in such situations, and I realized in hindsight how cozy my previous work environment has been. But only these challenging situations outside your comfort size make you a stronger consultant.
As a freelancer, you are expected to solve problems, not complain about challenging situations. So you better find a solution when twelve product designers plan to run usability tests, but you literally have no idea how to access your customers and you already tried everything in your power, with no success. These were stressful weeks.
You will spend most of your time communicating, coordinating, and evangelizing. 🧑🏻🏫
I don’t remember where I read this, but a smart person once said: 80% of UX research is communication. 20% is actual research. — Oh absolutely. Especially as a freelancer, you bring that fresh outside view into a team, you are the unbiased external expert who was brought in to not just run research projects, but to represent the discipline as a whole. You will find yourself in meetings and email chains, being asked to share your view on a conflict that seems unsolvable. You will be used as a sparring partner, as an out-of-the-box thinker, who has not been impacted by years of the corporate culture and established ways of doing things. You will ask tons of questions about why exactly are you working this way, questions some people might have stopped asking many years ago.
Remote work works very well. You can work for any client around the globe. 🌎
I am based in Berlin and the majority of my stakeholders were located in London, Amsterdam and New York. Remote work is here to stay and nothing stops you from working with clients all around the globe. All relevant remote working tools are established, 99% of meetings are virtual, and many people won’t even know where you are located. As teams become more distributed, this is your chance to work with clients you would have not easily had the chance to work with in the old pre-Covid world.
You will work alone from home most days. And it can get very lonely. 🧑🏻💻
Working in the morning, scuba diving in the afternoon? Sounds like a freelancing dream. Instagram makes us believe that the modern way of freelancing means building digital nomadic lives, working fully remotely from any remote island in the Pacific. But I believe that the reality looks different for the vast majority of freelancers, myself included. I spend a lot of time sitting at home until late in the evening, talking to people on Zoom calls. I no longer have my team around me, I am no longer part of a company — no more gossip, no more company Christmas parties, no more after-work beers. During the first six months of freelancing, it sometimes felt a bit lonely work-wise.
Social interactions, talking about ideas, collaborating, and just grabbing a coffee are important mental health boosters. Therefore, a few months ago I rented a small place together with two friends and ex-colleagues and we turned it into our small private co-working space, always having a spare desk for visitors. This place gives me so much more energy, because it just changed the dynamic and structure of the day, it brings many more social interactions, spontaneous brainstorming, and always a good laugh.
I know many people could not care less. They love working on their own. I love freelancing, but I missed the social element of work. And it took a while to learn that.
Get used to working with your clients’ software packages. 💽
How naive I was thinking that being my own boss, I could finally build my ideal processes with my favorite tools, not being dependent on what our IT department allows or forbids me to use.
In hindsight, of course I was wrong. As a freelance UX researcher, I am serving my client, not the other way around. Why would anyone care that I prefer Slack over Teams, that I rather work with Keynote, not with Powerpoint? Of course, I prefer Dropbox over Sharepoint, but why would a company seriously care? Not sure what I was thinking, but the fact is that you will be using whatever the company gives you. It is their ecosystem you work into, and their file management that you have to use. And if that means, you must log into a 2FA-protected virtual Windows 8 server environment in order to access your external company emails, well so be it. Get used to it. After a while, nothing else can shock you.
It is incredibly exhausting to jump between multiple clients and tools. 🧠
Speaking of tools and software: I have not anticipated the stress it brings mentally jumping from client to client within a day, including all the different software solutions that come with that. Client A works with Slack and Asana, client B with Teams and Jira, they all provide you with different Google logins. Just keeping your multiple calendars aligned can be a total pain. And now add some different time zones to the complexity as well. Do we meet London time, or CEST, oh you are in New York right now, so is that 6 hours difference now, let me check. Just managing a UK based and a German client in parallel, I confused time zones all the time when sending invites. And that does not include the actual mental work you do, staying up to date with conversations, ticket updates, requests, emails, etc.
I strongly suggest creating a solid productivity setup for yourself, when working with multiple clients in parallel. I personally use Notion and ToDoist as my project and task management solutions. In a future article, I will explain the Notion setup that helps me not lose my mind.
Teams will forget you are external and treat you like any other co-worker. 👨👩👦👦
An interesting observation at this point: The longer you work with a client, the more likely it is that they will just forget that you are a freelancer. There will be a moment when someone comes to you: “Oh, Konstantin, I realized you are not part of our daily stand-up. Do you want me to add you?” —People will ask you to join their weekly team syncs and join all kinds of planning workshops. Unfortunately, the answer to most of these invites must be no.
Do not forget that you are not part of the company and your success is not measured by the number of meetings you join. You are here to create value. They brought you in to push things forward, and execute at a speed and quality that only you can. Why is that: Because you are not distracted by all the politics, planning, discussions, noise and fuzz within a company. Keep that in mind when kindly rejecting an invite series.
Your costs and risks dramatically increase. Adapt your day rate accordingly. 💸
Being a freelancer comes with an increased amount of risk. Living in Germany, an employee gets at least 26 days per year of paid vacation. As a freelancer, obviously, you get zero.
If you are sick as an employee, your company will keep paying your salary for three more months, before your health insurance will continue covering the majority of your salary. As a freelancer, being sick and not working is your problem. No one will pay you.
The same is true for layoffs. There is a good level of protection in Germany. After probation, you can not just be fired without any reason. Being a freelancer, a client can get rid of you from one day to another.
Depending on your risk tolerance, definitely add a risk bonus to your day rate. Keep in mind that you might get sick, want to take time off to recharge your batteries, or you will run into an economic crisis (hello 2023) that might eliminate the majority of potential clients. Make sure you are able to grow a financial puffer whenever you work. As a freelancer you will have to pay for your hardware and software, office equipment, insurance, and eventually rent — average monthly costs can quickly reach 4 digits. All I can say is: Dividing your current monthly salary by 20 work days is not an adequate day rate for a freelancer.
