Chegg Tutor Ideation Workshops
The Story
At Chegg, I was known as the “workshop” guy. I never considered myself an expert at ideation workshops, I just threw myself into the process with an open mind and conducted more workshops than others at Chegg. I truly believed in their value of helping translate user insights into action.
One such project centered around ethnographic research with tutors. We spent a few weeks shadowing both online and traditional in-person tutors to learn about the tutoring process. Afterwards, we had a lot of insights and needed to solve the problem of “what do we do next?”. I knew that ideation workshops would provide the perfect approach to help with this problem. Our insights bucketed into 3 distinct themes, and I thus conducted 3 separate workshops around those themes. For example, one of our themes was the online disconnect between a tutor and a student. Online tutors, such as Chegg Tutors, lacked the cues that traditional in-person tutors had to better understand if a student was grasping the lesson - putting Chegg Tutors at a disadvantage. In our ideation workshop, we conducted an exercise called “Bad Ideas”, in which we came up with ideas to make the disconnect even worse! This exercise was not only fun but led to a lot of fascinating solutions by coming at the problem from a negative angle.
Key Research Questions To Solve
How can we collaboratively generate solutions from our generative research?
Methods Used
Workshops using a variety of techniques coopted from such resources as Design Sprints and Innovation Games
Tutors gesture to provide emphasis and call out key points. We observe offline tutors gesture effortlessly, while online tutors struggle.
Our team ideating: How might we improve gesturing within Chegg Tutors?
Solutions from a team
Why This Project Matters To Me
While the unknown outcome of workshops can be scary, I love the energy, collaboration, and ultimately the outcome of generating ideas from our research insights. I suppose I still don’t consider myself an expert in workshops because there is always a lot to learn, new approaches to try, and new spaces to explore. So I’ll still throw myself in with an open mind and encourage others in my organization to do the same. I even gave a “workshop about workshops” to other team members at Chegg in hopes of encouraging them to follow and also conduct more workshops.
Want to learn more about this research and its impact? Let’s chat!