CONTEXT
Chegg had recently announced the launch of its new bundled product offering called Chegg Study Pack, which is a heavily discounted bundle of their existing subscriptions services (including homework help, math help, writing help and more). Sales of the bundle were initially falling short of goals however. With nearly 8 million students subscribing to Chegg's services in 2022, the revenue implications for getting this right were significant. At this point I was onboarded to the project to help identify areas of opportunity to quickly drive higher sales of the bundle and prototype solutions for improving the acquisition funnel.
BUSINESS GOALS
• Improve the take rate of Chegg Study Pack, which is Chegg's premium-tier product offering
• Generate incremental revenue from our subscription services
CORE TEAM
• Data Scientist
• Marketing Copywriter
• Product Marketing Manager
• UX Researcher
• Engineer
• C-suite business stakeholders
MY ROLES
• Design Strategy
• UI/UX Design
Final handoff for the desktop design. But how did we get here?
THE ACQUISITION FUNNEL
In order to deliver impactful results as quickly as possible, I had to quickly identify and focus on the touchpoints in the acquisition funnel which had the highest potential impact. It turned out that the interstitial screen was a huge opportunity; it had a ton of user traffic, a relatively high drop-off rate, and it was the best place to educate users and upsell them on the benefits of choosing the bundled offering. The specific numbers are confidential, but the touchpoints within the acquisition funnel are shown below.
UNDERSTANDING THE USER CONTEXT
By working with our UX Research team, I discovered that a large volume of students who enter the acquisition flow and land on the interstitial are essentially "in a rush to get unstuck" from some sort of tricky homework problem or school-related challenge. For most students, this means they are looking for the minimal amount of information needed to help ground their purchase decision and feel ensured that Chegg will be able to help them address their needs.
The challenge then was to identify and design for that sweet spot, where users are getting just enough context to address their concerns, but also not so much information that it causes cognitive overload and they want to just give up.
Product page
Sign in / sign up
Interstitial
Checkout
KEY DESIGN CONSTRAINTS
• Working with existing brand guidelines and image assets
• Keeping a light engineering lift in order to meet project deadlines
• Creating a fully responsive and mWeb-friendly design
• Maintaining the CTA placement 'above the fold' on all breakpoints
• Working within a defined pricing/package structure
• Avoid use of any 'dark UX' patterns which could deceive users
• Explore solutions beyond the traditional comparison chart
Early design explorations of the interstitial screen
RAPID A/B TESTING
After leveraging some qual research to pick from a variety of initial design explorations, we honed in on one design that met user needs and internal stakeholder needs. But within that general UX framework, there were still plenty of unknown variables which could be quickly addressed through a series of rapid A/B testing and iteration, including but not limited to;
• What is the best headline to use?
• Should pricing be listed at the top or the bottom of each row?
• Should the CTA be placed at the top or the bottom?
• Does it matter if the bundle is listed on the left or the right?
• What was the appropriate amount of products/features to list?
• How much or how little context should be provided for each feature?
• How does changing the visual hierarchy impact performance?
Original design, redesigned for mWeb
CTA + pricing at bottom
CTA + pricing top
CTA + pricing top, slashed price
Final version for Desktop
RESULTS
Within less than two months, we had successfully improved the take rate of Chegg Study Pack by over 2X, generating significant incremental revenue for Chegg's subscription services. Further optimizations to the interstitial and the signup flow continued on well past this initial scope.
