Everything About UX Design Freelancers: Working As One or With a 👩🎤 UX Designer
UX design has become a highly demanded career these days, not only because more and more businesses need help with their online platforms, but also because it’s the kind of job that can be done from home.
And that last aspect in the middle of a pandemic is incredibly attractive for many freelancers out there. But how well do you know the context of a UX designer?
I believe that the more you get to understand what we do the better you can understand what your business needs in terms of UX; but also, decide which freelance UX designer you can choose.
Why Do You Need a UX Designer?
In a survey made by Adobe a few years ago, they noticed an interesting trend.
63% of the people who had hired five or more UX designers in the past year and the remaining 37% confirmed they were planning on hiring the double in the next year. If that was a few years ago, what could be happening now that so many startups and entrepreneurs are looking for UX/UI freelance designers? Essentially speaking, we no longer live in an era where a WordPress, Wix, or Blogspot site will be professional enough. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done, and only UX designers can do so efficiently for you. To summarize this story, here are some reasons why do you need a UX designer:
Organize your website. This not only means uploading your products’ pictures and descriptions. It also means putting one or another button in the exact place it has to be to make a sale. It’s mapping out the site well enough to make sure the user never gets lost or bored. And to do so, you need someone who understands very well what your audience is looking for. UX/UI designers make sure to transform whatever is in your future client’s mind into a beautiful and functional website. There are a lot of insights, numbers, interviews, and tests in this process. A good way to keep people interested in your site is to make it accessible to everybody. This includes a responsive site (meaning, it works well both on desktop and mobile apps), with a fast speed connection (you know you wouldn’t last long in a site that takes more than 10 seconds to load a page), and considering the browser someone is navigating from. For example, not everyone uses Chrome because it’s a browser that lately works very slowly, so adapting your site to different browser specifications guarantees that wherever they are connecting from everything runs according to the plan. And once everything is running perfectly, you need to gather information about your visitors! Where they are coming from, their daily behavioral habits, interests, if they already knew your product or service, and more.
How Does a UX Designer Do All That?
Usually, the UX designer job starts with product search, which basically means positioning a product or service in a way that there are no negative surprises for the users during the search. This starts by a thorough market and product research. It helps the designer to identify opportunities through data collection from different channels. Once they have all this information, the next step is defining the personas of the end-users. It’s like putting on faces, names, and personalities to a bunch of data for better comprehension. For example, if you sell car batteries, there are different types of people who may be interested in such products, and no, they are not all 40-year-old men who fix cars for a living. Sometimes they can be young women listening to their parents and buying an extra battery just in case, and sometimes they can be a family of four. Those three different types of visitors look for something different in your product and site, it’s the UX designer’s job to adapt your site to each of their needs through studying their behaviors and patterns. “So that’s it?” you may be wondering. And many UX freelance designers will be happy to tell you “Yes! It is!” but it’s just the top of the iceberg. It is also necessary to understand how the final product will look like (wireframes), prototyping (a clearer view of the final product adapting insights from data navigation and usability), testing and more testing (observing how the user interacts with the system and vice versa).
Conclusion
Working with a freelance UX designer, or working as one, is a rewarding path that continues to grow in demand. Whether you are a business looking for specialized UX expertise or a designer considering the freelance route, the fundamentals remain the same: good UX work is grounded in user research, structured through wireframing and prototyping, and refined through continuous testing and iteration.
The flexibility of freelance UX work benefits both sides. Businesses get access to experienced specialists without the overhead of a full-time hire, and designers get the freedom to choose projects that match their skills and interests. If you are exploring UX as a career, I recommend also reading about UX design jobs and the growing opportunities in remote UX design.