Chegg’s Q&A Growth
Web Design
Product Growth
Launched Project
Company
Chegg
2022.12-2023.2
Team
2 Product designers/me
1 Content designer
1 Product manager
1 UX researcher
2 Software engineers
My Role
Product Strategy
Product Design
What's the background?
Chegg is a popular homework-help service with 7.7 million subscribers. Its feature PaQ(Post a Question) is the key driver for Chegg Flywheel.
The more new questions posted by subscribers, the more students can find results via SEO and then convert to our subscribers.
We are facing the challenge…
Decline in Posted Questions YoY
Question asked per subscriber YoY in 2022
The business goal
Encourage subscribers to post more questions on Chegg
Primary Metric
# of new questions posted
Secondary Metric
% of questions askers in subscribers
# questions asked per asker
Guardrail Metric
Do not harm to Cancellation Request Rate
Outcome and impact
12
Experiments
(I led the design for a 6 of them!)
+1.6M
New Posted Questions
(from experiments winners)
Design solutions
Increasing feature awareness
Make the "Post a Question" (PaQ) entry point more prominent and strategically introduce additional entry points across the platform based on contextual relevance.
Jump to the design journey
Back to my challenge then…
Understand the “why”
3 main barriers
I teamed up with our UX researcher to dive into the mindset of our students. After analyzing feedback from 400+ subscribers, the barriers became clear:
👀
Awareness
30% of the participants were unaware that posting a question is part of their subscription.
🪨
Friction
Usability issues arose during question posting
😒
Hesitancy
51% participants were worried about wait time to get answer
Which part do we tackle first?
I set up a workshop with cross-functional teams to figure out our path forward. We used a confidence/effort matrix to focus our priorities.
Now I got my design problem…
#1 Increasing Awareness
Where we started
Discovered problems and opportunities
I worked with PM and another designer to map out the existing entry points, and we realized that some problems:
The current entry points on pages are not prominent enough.
The existing entry point via left navigation is hard to discover.
Some important pages lack contextual entry points.
Solution ideation
Ideated some high-level solutions
Based on those problems, we brainstormed some potential solutions, and I was responsible for the idea to introduce the [Post a question] feature via more contextual entry points across the platform.
2-step strategy
I decided to start with the existing entry point on the QnA content page then scale to different pages.
UI pattern explorations
Optimized the existing entry point
I generated ideas of the different variations of the entry points.
To determine which option works best, I shared the options with XFN and we evaluated these options against a set of metrics:
Fine-tuned the visual & content
Then I worked with the content designer to iterate on the widget.
After the first experiment, we saw a significant improvement in key metrics—enough that we expanded the widget across more surfaces on the platform. This was a win, but we weren’t done yet. There was still more ground to cover.
Next step
Expanded the widget across key surfaces
As a team, we aligned on those key surfaces. After viewing the feature traffic data. I suggested to put homepage and search page as the other two surfaces to focus on, since they accounted for the largest share of traffic for this feature. Then I pinpointed the key areas where the entry point of PaQ would add the most value.
Learn through experiments
Search page: driving users behaviors by unmet expectations
Experiment Insights
In the initial experiment on the search page, I put the widget at the end of the recommended search result, while from the experiment on the search page, I noticed that students are more likely to engage with the "Post a Question" widget when their search results are a partial match, as they might not have found an exact answer.
Iteration Solution
Adjusted the prominence of the widget based on the quality of the search results to cater to students' intent more effectively. This ensured that students who were less satisfied with the search results were gently encouraged to engage with the Q&A feature.
Also, I worked with the content designer to update the contextual copy to acknowledge the students' search experience and provide a more personalized interaction.
Home page: avoiding feature conflict
On the homepage, we ran an A/B/C test to find the ideal placement for the entry point, ensuring it wouldn’t hurt other features.
The impact!
#2 Reducing friction
Big drop off :(
The current posting question flow is buggy and not helpful. Only 31.8% users who came to the PaQ page finish posting the question.
Proposed solution
Streamlined the process and set up clear expectation.
Deal with eng push back
Still needed to include the subject selection step.
I got the pushed back from eng since we could not remove the subject selection step since we needed use that info to assign the questions to expert.
So I iterated the design by enabling auto-scroll and provide suggested subject list.
Think holistically
Provide instructions and review feature to make things easy from the expert side.
After I shared the solution with the PM from the expert, I got some feedback:even though we were able to make students post more questions, a lot of those questions were not “really successfully posted” since the image were dark and blurry or it contains more than 1 question in the screenshot so it was hard for the expert side to solve it.
I realized that we should consider the whole picture instead of just one side. So I suggested some fast follow up items like provide instructions of good image examples and supported file types. Also provide a more direct review and cropping capabilities.
