My business is about User Experiences at all scales. I can honestly say that being a freelancer has been THE BEST lesson for developing my capabilities as a UXer and Product Designer!
My business in it’s current format started because I took a step back from contracting so that I could travel with my family for my wife’s work. No one wanted a part time UX designer, as I understood it.
What I’ve learnt from running my own studio with clients of all sizes and sectors (my clients that range from independently local to globally recognised) is that UX is really about the impact relative to the size of the business.
So I started building websites, as I knew how to do that. Over time I learnt how to look after them, then improve them, then build more brand elements, then SEO, then paid ads…I basically added to my services according to what my clients were asking for.
However I felt like I wasn’t doing the UX work I’ve always known and done because the budgets were small and instead of focusing on a button or a particular journey, I needed to deliver entire websites.
When I left client site (9 years ago now), I was very much a UI UX designer with User Research and front end capabilities. I would spend a lot of time understanding requirements from product owners in a closed product system and turning those into meaningful designs with access to users and a delivery team – where, for example, we could prioritise changing a button as an entire feature. But that’s such a fortunate place to be – and the reasons for re-designing that button aren’t driven by you. They come from the business.
Now as a senior product designer, strategist and business owner I truly see why decisions are made.
When you’re working on a platform as part of a large team that builds a product where users are already in the system, it’s easy to think of anything outside the UX team such as marketing or branding as “not UX”…especially as you don’t actively work on building for acquisition.
I’ve also learnt the hard lessons of a business owner about cash-flow, project pipelines and seeing first hand how design decisions affect business outcomes.
For an independent business, the value isn’t about a button: it’s about making sure the user journey has been defined at all – that someone has actually asked how a customer finds the business, what convinces them to trust it, and what happens after they get in touch. Nobody inside a small business has the luxury of owning one button. The whole funnel is the product, rather than the focus being overly specific in the small output.
My revelation is my definition and understanding of UX: branding is UX; SEO is UX; A Google Business Profile is UX; even cash flow is UX, because a studio that can’t manage its own pipeline has no business designing someone else’s.