Freelance — interesting experience, nothing but a life lesson.
I graduated from General Assembly’s UX|UI immersive programs on Dec. 20th, 2018. The day before I graduated, I received an offer from an interior design agency to be the in-house user experience designer along with being a content strategist. Truly, I was super excited.
Coming back from a trip from Florida, my colleague and I began researching the company, understanding the competitive scope, putting together a heuristic evaluation, piecing the content strategy together, and creating a beautiful deck for the CEO and his five employees.
We were being paid hourly, I used this amazing application and website called AND Co. (for all you freelancers, this is truly an amazing platform to count hours, organize, and send invoices — only negative, you can’t collaborate with a team, it’s an individual time tracker).
We went into full detail as to where the company sits in the market, brand statement, brand values, why people would want to see on social media, general social media challenges, competitive analysis, and an idea of what we think we should be doing on social media along with a content calendar (full documents on competitive analysis and heuristic evaluation is on a shared excel document shared with CEO).
Came presentation time, the CEO was on his phone checking snapchat, we were interrupted quite often, and at one point, an employee became “impatient” and just said, “just run through the slides.”
Safe to say, my colleague and I were pretty upset but moreover confused, we didn’t understand why the company even hired us if no one was interested in what we were suggesting. At the end of the meeting, the client said, “let’s have the website live in a month.” HUH????
I was completely dumbfounded, is this how this thing works? We have to meet demands that are almost impossible? Do companies even take our job seriously? What is happening over here.
After our debrief, we were completely overwhelmed — after an hour, we came up with a solid plan that included weekends, overtime, and a website that was not UX approved, just graphically competent. The next day we explained that we will begin rolling out next steps when our billed was paid (after 3 weeks of research).
We were going back and fourth for about 2 weeks. Finally, received this e-mail.
I was utterly surprised.
“…interview for the position of marketing manager. These people had done research on our company on their own in preparation for the interview…it isn’t obvious to ____ why this would qualify as billable hours.
“He [CEO] feels like we haven’t even gotten started and the budget is exploding past what was laid out before and it’s making him uncomfortable.”
“The original timeline had our website launching in March, and would cost _____ week. I think we can live with that timeline, it’s only one month away. Please let me know how much further we need to push that back given the delay caused by the invoice problem. Also, was that timeline assuming you hired another person or not?” (Explain this one to me, if the CEO’s cost are exploding, how are we able to hire more people to get the job done?)
This was sent on a Friday night at 8:12pm. I took a deep breath and answered.
I know the picture is rather small, but I think this is a great example of standing your ground, explaining that research is not an easy Google search, along with the fact that there is a contract which me, my colleague, and the CEO signed.
For all those new freelancers out there, this happens. As a UX designer, I was told that the best way to get into the business is by freelancing, I still trust the system, however, I will be now asking for a deposit before starting my work— and I trust that all other UX designers do the same. This is just another aspect of life, you can never fail, you learn.
If anyone has any other stories or tips, I’m all ears!
