User research isn't just for client work. Even on personal projects, talking to friends about your design decisions and studying competitors makes you a better designer. Start with semi-formal interviews or quick surveys.
User research is not only at the beginning of the design process. It is constantly iterating whatever design decisions you have by trying to get close to your user as much as you can. When working on personal projects, you might think that, oh, because this is a personal project, I really do not need to prioritize research. But working on personal projects helps you to also start to imbibe that habit of gathering feedback. So even when you can't have full-skilled user interview sessions or full-skilled user research sessions. You could have semi-formal interviews with friends, colleagues, family members. And even if you don't have the luxury of time to go through that process of interviewing people, you could leverage existing surveys online or competitive analysis in the problem space that you are trying to solve. One thing that is very, very important is to make sure that the majority of your design decisions are backed by research and data, and that will definitely make you a better designer.
