Advantages of Being Freelance UX Researcher
1. I am not personally attached to any brand. I care only about the usability of the product and the mental models of the User.
2. Open License for constructive Criticism. People collaborate with me exclusively for this. (Especially no ego clashes, I have heard in some big firms, product & design teams prefer to do their user research by themselves instead of collaborating with existing UX Research Team)
3. Understanding different set of users in different domains in a short time with different business goals is absolutely a great ride. Also, make me more unbiased.
4.You get exposure to a lot of industries, office styles, and people’s work preferences so that you can form opinions as to what you like best, and use that info as you shape the future of your career.
Disadvantages of Being a Freelance UX Researcher
1.Convincing the Insights to stakeholders in the discovery & exploration phase is not easy, especially when those insights are against their current business strategy.
2. Depth Understanding of the users from certain domains comes only with time by listening to different experiences of the different kinds of users. Also, by following up with the user.
3.As a freelancer, most of the time we will get the opportunity to clear immediate design doubts of the design team. we might miss the hidden one or the underrated one.
4.You can potentially spend a lot of time hustling to find your next gig (when you’d rather be just working).
5.If you are paid hourly then you may not be invited to some meetings where they don’t think “you’re necessary”, and as a result, you can miss out on larger conversations or context which could be both be useful for the project AND make things more interesting for you personally.
In my perspective,The product Team can hire Freelance UX researchers in Testing Phase for best results. An in-house UX Researcher is needed for the product team in Discovery & Exploration phase for best results.It doesn't mean that freelance UX Researchers are not capable of Discovery & Exploration phase, I am just saying that they are ideally best suited for the Testing phase.
Feel free to share your opinions, I am open to hearing different kinds of opinions!