I’ve been freelance designing for over a year now and I finally landed my first contracted UX Design job. It wasn’t anything long term, the company I was working with needed some short-term help due to the demand for design projects they had flowing in.

When I joined the team I was conducting potential interviews, creating user flow charts and low-fidelity designs. The issues I hit was looking at the overall scope of the projects I was working on, there were so many moving parts.

What I learned

I learned a lot on this journey, I got more familiar with Sketch and I was also introduced to Abstract, Harvest, Asana.

Asana is another task management tool that you can use to assign tasks/due dates to your team.

Abstract is a great tool every designer should know how to use. This is like the github for designers and if your team is using Sketch this is a great option for you. Using this product reminded me how much more I love Figma collaboration tools.

Harvest is a time tracker that allows you to add specific categories. This allows you to record the hours worked on each category (ex: research, UX strategy, Low-fidelity designs, etc) and communicates to your team if you’re budgeting enough hours for each category. If you’re a freelancer looking for a tool to track time I highly recommend this one.

Difficulties

One thing I struggled with was not being able to communicate directly with the client. As a freelancer, I was so used to being able to reach out to the client whenever I wanted. I’ve always been an over communicator, I’d rather make sure we’re on the same page than assume.

At times I also felt out the loop, since this was also my first remote job I was learning how to communicate. I was accustomed to being able to walk to up to my coworkers in the past and have a conversation rather than just “slacking” them.

Final thoughts

I loved working with this company for many reasons, my co-workers/boss were very nice people and were always there when I needed them. I was able to complete all of the tasks they assigned to me as well.

I’m hoping in the future they reach back out to me, but until then on to the next job 🙌🏼