Chegg Skills
Gamification / Badges
Overview
Chegg is an education technology company that provides homework help, digital and physical textbook rentals, textbooks, online tutoring, and other student services.
Chegg Skills is a branch dedicated to providing education for learners who come from a non-traditional education background. Chegg Skills uses their online programs teach practical, real-world skills in a wide range of in-demand fields - which increase confidence, satisfaction, higher earning potential, and new job opportunities for their users.
Approach
Chegg wanted to address a drop in user satisfaction, retention, and graduation rate on their Skills platform. User feedback showed that there was a lack of not engagement and enjoyment during the user's online course journey.
The idea of gamification had been discussed with UX teams previously and I was tasked with exploring it further.
I began with researching existing gamification methods on existing platforms and competitors. I next worked within Chegg’s style guidelines to come up with a series of icons, badges, and cards to be used along the user's journey. The users would achieve and collect badges and awards along their learning journey through award overlays, toasts, and animations.
These badges and achievements also needed to be accessed through a dashboard and award gallery so the user could find their achievements easily while staying on task.
While some of these badges could be obtained during the onboarding process to help increase onboarding completion rate, other badges were found throughout the courses to create a sense of engagement, excitement, and progress. Higher user satisfaction would help increase Chegg's graduation and completion rates.
The new award and achievement system provided Chegg with an on brand and engaging method of retaining users while helping motivate them forward towards their goals.
Initial gamification research started by viewing direct and indirect competitors site like Duolingo and understanding how gamification is leveraged to increase user engagement
Most instances of gamification include a base set of icons, cards, or characters that are used or presented along the user's journey. A base set of icons, tokens, cards were created that incorporated Chegg Skills brand styling while including excitement and fun
A Left Nav Bar was developed to house the gamification progress, icons, cards, and status. Progression bars and achievement cards were developed and sized to fit
Toasts, and achievement cards with progression bars were created to inform the user of their progress towards goals along their journey. Toasts could be incorporated on screen in real time, while achievement cards would live in the Left Nav Bar
Examples for the Left Nav Bar in different states as the user unlocked achievements and continued through their journey
The Left Nav Bar would function as a slide out from the left side of the screen and overlay the main Chegg Skills Dashboard - giving the user the ability to quickly see their progress without becoming disoriented
An award overlay was created for the user to receive their new unlock or achievement in-journey and real-time. This creates a sense of excitement, satisfaction, and again helps the user not become disoriented during there learning by jumping to another page or screen
An example of a set of achievement cards
We wanted the user to be able to view all of their achievements and awards. Different gallery views and display methods were explored
A working version of a gallery was chosen to develop further that showed achievements and awards in obtained and unobtained states. The user could see statistics and various views. This helped increase the desire of the user to gain more achievements or complete achievements, thereby increasing there class and course completion percentages overall.
Outcome
During the development of the badges and gamification, there was a sense of enjoyment among the team itself which carried over to the test users as well.
There was also encouraging positive feedback from executive stakeholders who were hoping to develop this concept further in the very near future to be coupled with an overall redesign of the Chegg Skills learning experience.