Until last week, I was working as a user researcher in the healthcare industry. I’m a freelancer, and my contract has been canceled.

Any suggestions on getting work?

This was my exact question to a designer who’s been freelancing for over half a decade now.

Here’s what he had to say:

Well, I know, that isn’t unusual.

I’ve heard from several people who work as contractors in user research that have been laid off. And I’m thinking of ways that those people could earn an income while they’re off. I’ve got some suggestions for you — not the obvious ones like obviously you could try and sell remote usability testing to clients, you could also try expert reviews and so on.

But what I wanted to do was give you some ideas that you might not have thought of, which are ways to supplement your income. I don’t think any of these will make you rich, but, you know, they could pay your grocery bill. Here are some suggestions.

Writing Design

So the first idea that I’ve got is to think about writing a book. Hold on a second! Bear with me. Do you know that people say that everybody’s got a book inside them?

Well, if that’s true, then I think everyone has ten ebooks inside them. If you thought of writing an e-book instead, you could get the e-book out fairly quickly, and that could cause some of you to get some income fairly quickly as well. The trick with ebooks is to make them as specialized as you possibly can. So don’t write about user experience.

Don’t write about user research. Don’t write about usability testing.

Write about how to analyze the data from a usability test.

That way, you can keep the e-book relatively short, but it’s also quite meaningful that the people that might want to buy it would find it. So, as an example, let’s say that you gave yourself the job of writing five hundred to a thousand words a day, like a blog post, basically.

Do that for a month; you’ll have somewhere between ten and twenty thousand words. Perfect length for an e-book that you could then charge a fiver or so for it and that would cause some income for you and might help you a little bit with some of these other ideas over the hump.

Create a Course or Conduct Webinars

A second idea would be to try to create an online training course. So I’ve got online training courses on Udemy, and they’ve been a useful supplement to the money that I earn through User focus. You could do that too.

Again, I think the idea is to be specialized in areas that you’re particularly good at to make sure that you’re providing real value to people. And there are platforms like Skillshare, Udemy that allow you to put these courses together. They’ll host the videos for you.

Your only job is to come up with the appropriate syllabus. Related to that, another idea is to create a webinar. Maybe you could do a one-hour webinar on your specialist subject.

You could then not only sell tickets for the webinar itself, but when the webinar’s complete, you could also sell that video as a ‘play on-demand,’ and that would be another way for you to get this kind of passive income that’s going to be important to help you over this particular hump.

Coach Individuals

And a fourth idea would be to try coaching. Presumably,y you’ve got to your stage as an experienced user researcher — if you’re contracting, then you’re obviously at the kind of senior user research level — you’ve got some knowledge that younger people in the field would really benefit from.

Why not offer to coach to a group of, say, four to six people? You could run a session once a week with those people — give them some homework afterward that you can then give them some feedback on the following week. Maybe if you did that for, say, a six-week period, at the end of that, you would have given them some real value that they can use in their job, and people are always willing to pay for that.

Like I’ve said, none of those are going to make you rich. But if you did each of those over time, you might find that you might get, say, a third of what you were earning in your contracting job.

And that will help you get over the hump. So that when things do pick up — and they will pick up after this — when they do pick up, you’ll be in a great position to continue with your contracting career.