Team size and structure
- We are nested inside Chegg’s product organization
- Designers, researchers, and content strategists each support up to a handful of engineering teams
- We all work closely with PMs and other stakeholders to collaborate on our projects and move towards a UX vision
Here’s an example of how we might collaborate on a new feature:
- PM leads opportunity sizing and resource planning based on input from user researcher and designer on student needs
- PM collaborates with UX design, content design and user researcher to formulate a project plan and determine scope
- Designer, researcher, and content designer work together to craft the end-to-end flow, the UI, the content in it, and determine the best design options based on research.
- This is usually a very iterative process with multiple rounds of design explorations and testing
- Designer, researcher, and content strategist work together to apply recommendations from research. This includes collaborative design crits, brainstorming sessions, and asynchronous feedback in tools like slack and Figma.
- Designer and PM work together to share designs with engineering
- Designers work with engineering to ensure that the code is meeting UX standards and accessibility needs
- Feature launches and PM works with data team to share the results and plan future iterations
Recurring team events
Campfire
Campfire is a 1-hour event that happens on a monthly basis and includes the Creative Marketing and Product teams. Campfire is an opportunity to learn more about projects we haven’t seen before, get inspired by peers, give interaction, visual, brand or general feedback, and collaborate with people outside of our specific roles.
Weekly design crits
Each team holds their own crits. You can expect a friendly atmosphere and teammates that lead with questions and ideas.
Visual specialist office hours
A weekly chance for designers to share work with visual designers to get specific feedback on their UI work
Team-specific events
Each team also organizes its own meetings, workshops or brainstorm sessions for collaboration across design, research, and content strategy.
Learning and education
Dork Day
Quarterly offsite for Chegg user experience research team to share ideas, opportunities, and laughs.
UX week
Each year the design team organizes a week-long event to bond, learn from outside experts, and have some fun too. This year’s presentations included:
- Jared Spool - Beyond the UX Tipping Point
- Jared Spool: Making UX Strategic - The journey to becoming more proactive and strategic
- Neby Teklu from the Chan Zuckerberg Institute: Race and recess: Design tools for reducing inequities
- Usually, UX week happens in our Santa Clara office, though during the pandemic we have moved it to zoom (though we still make sure everyone gets to enjoy great snacks and meals).
- For fun, we also did some drag queen Bingo with Brita Filter
Accessibility training
All designers, researchers, and content strategists are required to complete accessibility training to ensure our product is usable by all types of students. We have weekly working sessions where we make progress on our accessibility courses together. Required courses include:
- Accessibility Fundamentals - Disabilities, Guidelines, and Laws English
- Designing an Accessible User Experience
- Semantic Structure and Navigation
- Images, SVG, and Canvas
- Visual Design and Colors
- Form Labels, Instructions, and Validation
Ongoing workshops and speakers
We also organize ongoing workshops with outside experts, coming up later this year we will welcome Mike Monteiro who will lead interactive sessions on Presenting Work with Confidence. We’ve also held internal trainings for tools we use including Figma, Principle, Jira, and Amplitude.
EDU4U
Through the program, full-time US employees get $350 and FTEs in Israel and India get $250 to spend on educational pursuits. Some team members recently used their stipends to purchase interaction design foundation memberships, online courses, and UX-related books.
Learning stipend
Each full-time UX team employee has $750 to spend on conference registration, training or classes each calendar year. In order to be eligible for the conference budget, employee have to be at Chegg for at least 12 months and from one of our US offices.*
How people have grown on the team
A few examples of some team members who have grown at Chegg:
- Christina Grillo joined us in in 2019 as a UX designer and was promoted to Senior UX Designer this fall
- Yalu Ye has been with us since 2017, she has grown from UX Designer to UX Design Manager
- Kiley Rundle joined in 2018 as a Senior Product Designer, she is now a UX Design Manager
- Jui Didolkar started at Chegg in 2016 as a Senior UX Designer, she is now Director of UX Design
- Kelsey Wort started as a UX research intern in 2019 and is now a full-time UX researcher
Career Growth Paths
We have paths for both IC-track and manager track, check them out in our career ladder. (Note: ladders can vary across the team)
Initiatives to advance design
- We have a design system team dedicated to building out our component library in Figma and working on future iterations of our design system that will help chegg.com become more integrated and seamless. They are supported by dedicated engineering resources that translate those components into JavaScript components.
- Each month the UXR Voice of the learning series invites the entire company to watch a recording of a user interview and ask questions.
- We also regularly take on conceptual or visionary design projects to help the whole product move towards a holistic end-state.
