Remote UX writing? Of course you can
If you read Melissa Williams’s great intro to remote UX writing recently, as I did courtesy of The Dash, you may well be intrigued by the prospect of taking the plunge and going remote. Perhaps you’ll also go freelance.
I’ve been doing both for the last three years, having spent more than 10 years as a remote freelance writer and editor, and more than 20 doing that kind of work overall. Bottom line: what I’m about to tell you didn’t happen overnight.
Six weeks ago I moved to Ghana, West Africa with my Ghanaian partner. The plan is for me to support us here for the next couple of years by continuing to work as a freelance UX writer (and other writer. Let’s not put needless boundaries on things, shall we?).
Melissa’s article made me realise I’m kind of in the midst of a perfect storm of remote UX writing, and I thought you might find my adventures on the High Seas of WTAF amusing.
This is the first story, hopefully of a few.
(Really) remote UX writing: the finances
If you’re thinking, “Pfft, simple. You’re earning AU dollars and paying Ghanaian whatevers. You’ll live like a king!” let me elaborate on a few details.
- The currency of Ghana is the Cedi. The exchange rate sits around 3.5 Cedis to one Australian dollar.
- Things like Internet connections and data have so far proven almost as expensive as they were for me in Australia.
- I have a mortgage in Australia that I continue to pay from here. And since you don’t freelance for 10 years without learning to pay yourself superannuation like a normal Australian worker, I’m budgeting for that, too (at least 10% of gross income).
- When I am cap-K King we’ll be using the barter system, thank you very much.
But wait. I’m not here alone, right? My Ghanaian partner can help pay our way, can’t he?
Well, thankfully he has a cute fixer-upper that we’re living in, 35km west of the capital city, Accra. That means we have no local housing cost, which is a huge bonus.
It’s unlikely my partner will be able to get work here, though. While Ghana is no longer on those “poorest countries in the world” lists and is nominally the global “leader in economic growth”, plenty of Ghanaians are unable to find work, including those with university educations. This reflects the reality that economic growth alone isn’t always a measure of “good”. The most likely way he could earn an income here would be to start his own business, which, since he’s a glazier, would take more cash than he has right now. Also, given way things work here, it would be a very slow burn indeed.
So, what if the whole freelancing thing doesn’t work out? Well, friend, failure is not an option! My visa doesn’t allow me to work in Ghana. My partner does not have a work right in Australia. We must depend on my landing remote UX writing work through my Australian clients to survive here, and maintain my house in Australia ahead of (what we hope will end up being) our return.
As Tom McDonnell pointed out back in 2017, Ghana’s capital Accra has a strong tech community. That’s probably why Twitter’s Jack Dorsey is visiting this month. But to paraphrase Tom’s article, Ghana basically needs to become a different country — along with, from what I’ve seen in an admittedly short time here, a shift in culture* — before it can become what he calls a “global technology winner” if indeed that is even desirable.**
From the perspective of someone living in the burbs, rather than Accra’s expat heartland (which, predictably, clings for dear life to the fringes of the CBD), even some of his “reasons people love living and working in Ghana” do not apply to this particular remote freelancer.
Connecting the Internet
Okay, that’s the background. Let’s get to the first step in being a remote UX writer (after interest and skill): an internet connection. (We’ll talk about completing actual client work to something approximating a professional standard next time.)
I’ll try to make this scannable so you can get the gist with the headings and dig into the detail only if you want to. Also note, this is my experience. If I were in ExpatLand in the city, the story would be very different.
Coworking = not viable
When you see stories of tech nerds freelancing from places like Bali or Thailand, they’re usually hanging out in some fancy coworking space replete with swimming pools and cocktails. Tom McDonnell’s article makes it sound like Accra is similar. But to be honest, even after taking 5 weeks off to get settled here, I haven’t sussed out coworking spaces other than to eye off their red pins on Google Maps. Why? For several reasons.
Firstly, I’ve never worked in a coworking space because I keep my business overheads as microscopic as possible. Secondly, all of Accra’s coworking spaces are clustered around the city centre. The closest to me is 21km away, a distance which Maps (unreliable here but let’s go with it) says takes no less than 75 minutes to drive in the morning peak hour, and longer in the evening.
Public transport is trotros, local minibuses that crawl along the roadsides looking to fill with travellers before they go anywhere, so they take even longer.
Of course, it’s not just time that’s a problem: it’s petrol. Fuel here currently costs AU$1.50 a litre (5.33 Cedis, basically half of the new hourly minimum wage, which I understand few workers actually make anyway). How can Ghanaians afford to drive? I have no idea, but right now our budget can’t justify the petrol, on top of the coworking space fee, for me to luxuriate even in Accra’s shabbiest coworking spaces.
City travel sidenote: it’s a riot! (Literally)
If you’re still stuck on the driving times (21kms in seventy-five minutes???!!?) let’s take the scenic route to the next section of this article.
You may have heard that the traffic in African cities is notorious. In Melbourne, people complain (justifiably) about the West Gate Bridge in peak hour. Accra traffic is orders of magnitude worse; I say this having experienced traffic in places like Jakarta, Mexico City and Bogotá. The 35km drive to Accra’s CBD has never taken us less than 90 minutes in a car. This weekend it took us 8.5 hours to drive 290km out of Accra, and 9 to return. Here’s an example of why.
The traffic in Ghana is bad because the vehicles are all quite literally first-world write-offs, the drivers buy licenses rather than earn them through a test, and the “roads” are indescribable in their “construction” and “maintenance”.
These cratered, shoulderless, oft-submerged, rarely paved caricatures of roadways are busy not just with the aforementioned write-offs and trotros and motos and their recent wreckage; but also with broken-down, overloaded trucks; plus all the usual foot traffic — human and otherwise — of developing countries, including corrupt/underpaid police stopping you either to beg for money or extort it from you.
And that, dear reader, is how it can take 75 minutes to travel 21km. It would be faster on a horse, but all we have is goats.
Data plan costs: Ghana on par with Australia
So working from home is the go. Great! I planned for this, my people!
In Australia I ran my business from home in the country on 20GB of data per month via off-net ADSL for AU$60 a month. I also had 5GB of data on my phone for AU$15 a month. Where I lived, this was market rate for the internet. Before I came to Ghana I checked out how much 20GB of data cost here, and basically wound up expecting to pay about the same price.
Again, as with the fuel, the real issue here is how limiting this is for Ghanaians. Just last year, mobile phone penetration was 119%, but internet access languished at less than 50%—although that was considered “relatively high”, presumably in comparison to the continental average. Today, mobile internet access is reputed to sit at just 31%; from what I’ve seen, very few Ghanaians have smartphones.
I’ve signed up to a Vodafone home fibre internet plan of 40GB for 140 Cedis (around AU$40) a month. Cheaper than Australia, right? Yes, except that here the data seems to be going mysteriously faster: I appear to use around 1GB a day.
How can this be so? My habits have changed only in that I haven’t been working, so I’m not downloading invision files and having Zoom calls every five seconds. Given the state of this particular nation, I put it down to rampant “profiteering”, yet again at the expense of Ghanaians who can’t afford it anyway. Ultimately I expect 40GB won’t be enough, so I’ll need to buy more.
Getting connected! …and staying that way?
Suspicions aside, we have a starting point. When will we be connected? Last Wednesday! …only no one came. This tracks with all our Vodafone experiences to date: when we first made the connection request, it was cancelled without our knowledge because “two requests were put into the system.” So both were cancelled.
Then the surveying technician couldn’t find our house, because there are no street names beyond the CBD and major highways (and thus, as an aside, no home mail delivery), rendering house numbers useless. Since prettymuch no one has a smart phone, there’s no point sending anyone a map location. Or a even photo of the place.
If you want to get someone to your house, you basically get on the phone with them, ask where they are, then talk them through the process of getting to the point at which you are standing in the road outside your house ready to flag them down.
But what if they don’t know the area, or you can’t understand each other, perhaps due to mutual difficulty with English, which, while it’s the national language here, is after all regional; maybe because of accents; or possibly because the poor connections and phones mean you simply cannot hear each other properly? Then this approach fails, too.
Finally the connection technician called us one morning at 7.50am to say he’d come on Wednesday. The next we heard was on Saturday morning, when he called to ask why we weren’t home. We need to call him direct—there’s no call centre, or even apparently centralised management of this — next week to arrange a new connection time.
In future, to pay for more internet when each 40GB runs out, we’ll need to drive to the nearest Vodafone office, which is just over 10km from our house. Why? Because in Ghana apparently next-to-no business is conducted either via telephone or the internet. Not even Vodafone’s.
So despite all my good intentions of getting a solid internet connection within five weeks of arriving, I’ve gone back to work using a battery-powered pocket wifi and mobile tethering, where the data costs 20 Cedis (AU$6) for 4GB over 7 days, and which, as I said, seems to last around 4 days given our current usage.
Pocket wifi will be necessary even after we get a home connection because where I live, the power is frequently cut (again, I don’t think this is a problem in the expat suburbs), and while this will affect the modem, remote UX writers still gotta work, right? The pocket wifi signal can prove pretty flaky at times, but it’s the only other option.
Bottom line: prayers and humour
Praying to any of Ghana’s various gods may be necessary to keep the Good Ship GL afloat on the aforementioned high seas of WTAF. Good humour and inordinate patience, the latter of which I am very swiftly cultivating, also have their roles. As it turns out, though, the internet is in many ways the least of my worries.
Remote UX writers have clients, and they have professional expectations. I need to meet those first-world expectations under self-funded, developing-country conditions. So the return to life- and mortgage-sustaining work via unpredictable wifi amid power outages and paint rollers in the hopes that everyone’s needs are met is a kind of a deal. We’ll talk more about that next time.
But for now, let me know your thoughts, questions and comments so I can answer them below or in the next update.
*See references to corruption, exclusion, and approaches to communication above. I’d wager all of these dampen first-world-style, largely desk-bound tech business (and, clearly, economic development as a whole). Of course, local startups succeed within this context and business culture.
**Concepts like “Global Technology Winner” seem a bit ridiculous when the kinds of technology actually needed in Ghana are often dramatically different from those getting attention in Silicone Valley or even little old Melbourne, Australia.
