Designing a new user flow and dashboard for college students that increased task completion rate by 38%

Despite high free traffic, subscriptions were low. How can we increase subscription growth to meet Chegg’s goal?

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Chegg was looking to increase their year-over-year subscription growth for Chegg Writing to 52%.

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Chegg Writing was made up of a free citations site and a subscription-only grammar and plagiarism site.

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Despite the citations site getting significant free traffic (30M total yearly users), subscriptions to Chegg Writing were very low (.04% of total yearly users).

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High traffic was Chegg’s biggest asset, so the question was: how can we get more free users to subscribe to Chegg Writing?

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Free users aren’t subscribing because they aren’t aware of the grammar/plagiarism tools, and they’re frustrated with usability issues

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I worked with a UX researcher and helped interpret her research, which revealed that free users were not subscribing because:

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1. They had low awareness of the grammar/plagiarism tools. Only 23% were aware the tools existed and only 62% could upload a paper to the grammar/plagiarism site from the citations site after being instructed to. This was because they couldn’t find the tools due to distracting ads and the two sites being siloed.
2. They thought there were too many usability issues on the site, especially for the price. The citations site had both a low NPS score (25) and System Usability Scale score (58.2).

I designed a new free user flow and dashboard to combine the citations and grammar/plagiarism sites, which increased awareness by 77% and task completion rate by 38%

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The original roadmap only included small UI changes, but I did not think those changes would allow us to meet our goal. I advocated for a larger strategic change: a new user flow and dashboard that unified the citations and grammar/plagiarism sites.

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Now, after completing a citation, users landed on a dashboard highlighting the grammar/plagiarism tools. This approach was grounded in the research indicating that increasing awareness and usability could boost subscriptions.

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I partnered with our Product Manager and UX researcher to test the new flow. Results showed a 77% increase in awareness of the grammar/plagiarism tools and a 38% increase in task completion for uploading a paper.

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Chegg’s 2020 financial statements later confirmed that the company achieved its goal of 52% year-over-year subscription growth.

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