A Day in the Life of a Freelance UX Writer

6:00 am: Wake up and morning pages
6:30 am: Yoga and meditation
7:30 am: Green juice, healthy breakfast, shower
9:00-11:00 am: Uninterrupted writing time
11:00 am: Walk in the neighborhood
11:30 am-1:30 pm: Uninterrupted writing time

Wait, what?! That’s NOT what my schedule looks like at all.

So what does a freelance UX writer do all day?

UX writing involves a lot of different tasks.
Freelancing involves a lot of different tasks.
Put those two together, and well, chances are no two days will look the same.

Client projects eb and flow, while sometimes there’s more admin work than other times (ahem, tax season…), but a freelance UX writer can expect their day to roughly split up into three “buckets”: interacting with clients, writing, and admin/business management.

Let’s break them down.

Interacting with clients

As I’ve written before, UX writing isn’t a solo craft. As a UX writer—in-house or freelance—you’ll be working closely with product managers, designers, and often other people within a company, such as marketing or branding people, developers, and more.

That means: meetings!

In UX writing, you typically can’t write anything until you’ve had a meeting with the relevant stakeholders. Here are some of the types of meetings that are essential to UX writing work:

• Voice and tone: This is where the client presents the company’s vision, mission, values, user background, competitors, and more so that you can build out the product’s voice and tone. It’s your job to probe and ask questions so you can understand the brand personality and how the product “speaks.” You’ll probably also ask questions about terminology, style preferences, and any other resources you should be aware of.

• Screen/flow reviews: UX writing is all about helping a user get from point A to point B (and then point C and D and so on…) within a digital interface. The best way to understand and define that is typically to meet with the product team and go over the screens or wireframes to see what happens at each step. You’ll want to know how a user gets “in” and “out” of each screen and what happens if they encounter an error and can’t move forward.

If you hate meetings, a few words of reassurance:

• The client will be doing most of the talking. Yes, you’ll need to ask guiding questions, but you’ll also need to do a lot of listening.

• Getting everyone in the same room (whether physical or virtual) can really, truly save a LOT of unnecessary back-and-forth over email or Slack. Make yourself a coffee (or any other beverage of choice), take a deep breath, and power through!

• You probably won’t need a meeting for every flow or screen. Usually one or two at the beginning suffices, plus follow-up meetings whenever there’s a really big, new feature (i.e., typically not that often). Once you have the gist of the product, you can do a lot via asynchronous messaging or using screen-recording tools, like Loom.

Writing

As a UX writer, you’re going to write (duh). But don’t expect to be banging away at a keyboard all day long. As with any other type of writing, there’s a lot of research and thinking you’ll probably have to do before you put any words to “paper.”

And don’t expect all the writing to fit neatly into what you think of as UX writing. As a freelance UX writer, you’ll not only be writing interface copy, such as success messages, buttons, error messages, tooltips, and more, for clients, but also:

• Voice and tone guides/style guides

• Do’s and don’ts for designers or other writers

• Explanations to back up your copy choices

• Thought leadership pieces to build your brand

Admin/business management

As a freelancer—whether you’re a UX writer, an accountant, or a massage therapist—you’re running a business, which means you probably wear a lot of hats.

Here are some of the tasks that are part of any self-employed person’s day:

• Prospects/leads: When someone reaches out about a new project, you’re the one who has to talk to them to see if they’re a good fit and to share details about your workflow, pricing, availability, and more. When there’s a slump in business, you’ll need to put on your pitch hat and go out to get more clients, too.

• Finances and accounting: Proposals, invoices, taxes… Even if it makes your head spin, you have to be on top of it to make sure you’re getting paid and running your business by the book.

• Branding and marketing: Word-of-mouth is great, but freelancers can’t depend on anyone else to do the pitching and client-hunting for them, so most of us also try to invest resources (yes, work hours) in building a personal brand, often by creating content, such as blog posts (yes, like this one!), TikTok videos, LinkedIn posts, and more to help us get our name and work out there.

One thing’s for sure: between the different types of projects/clients/industries and the different “buckets” you’ll be dipping into day in and day out, you can count on NEVER being bored as a freelance UX writer! Freelance UX writing is truly a dream for anyone who loves learning new skills and topics, constantly being challenged, and being the master of your destiny.

Looking to break into freelance UX writing? UX to Success launches soon! Sign up for the waitlist to get all the details as soon as they come out.