HOW CAN WE IMPROVE DUOLINGO?

UX/UI Case Study

THE PROJECT BRIEF

For this class project your team will be researching, designing, prototyping, and testing a reboot to an existing digital product. The focus of this project was to find and improve upon pain points since designers often do not have the liberty of designing a project from the ground up.

Ultimately the goal of this project is to answer the question: What should this product look like 5 years from now?

WHAT IS DUOLINGO?

Duolingo is a freemium language-learning platform that includes a language-learning website and app. Their goal is to give everyone access to a private tutor experience through technology. They make their lessons fun and appealing to everyone by applying a gamification system into every lesson.

A LOVE FOR LANGUAGE

Both of us were instantly drawn to Duolingo and found out along with design, we are also learning a secondary language at WWU. SJ is studying with a minor in Japanese while Amy is studying with a major in Chinese. Our passion for learning and understanding another country's language and culture was a huge driving force in each step of the process toward our solution.

CONTRIBUTIONS

Amy Spengler: Contextual research, interviews, user journey map, survey question/analysis, competitor research, goals, priority pyramid, value promise, user flow map, sketches, paper prototype, Sketch mockups, InVision prototype, user testing, case study.

SJ Anderson: Contextual research, interviews, user journey map, survey question/analysis, ethnographic field studies, goals, priority pyramid, value promise, sketches, paper prototype, culture map/navigation icon and assets, user testing, pitch.

THE RESEARCH

In 2015, Duolingo reached over 10 million users, showing it had quite a successful approach to language learning. At first we were not sure who or how we wanted to approach our target demographic. Both Amy and SJ have used Duolingo before. 

We decided to better define our target audience through interviews, user journey maps, and surveys, to name a few.

THE INTERVIEWS

In the early stage of research, we were unsure if we wanted to target new or existing users. We interviewed over six people, finding they have all used Duolingo in the past. Our ages range from elementary students to mainly college students and even older adults in their 50s-60s.

What stated out as understanding how users or non-users use Duolingo and why they wanted to learn a new language in the first place led to some interesting trends.

THE USER JOURNEY MAP

Since our interviews had only existing users, our user journey maps focused more on a new user's encounter with Duolingo from getting started in picking a language to finishing their first course. This was iterated later in our ethnographic field studies, but when receiving a "reward" from completing a lesson, most users were confused by it.

THE SURVEY

While we began to see trends through our previous research, we wanted more general and broader answers from the current Duolingo demographic. We created an online survey, sharing not only with family and friends, but also on the internet. We selectively posted our survey on two Reddit forms: r/Duolingo and r/SampleSize.

There are some dangers to posting a survey publicly, but one of the forums was a dedicated place for users to spend their free time answering surveys. We carefully and clearly labeled our survey for "current or former Duolingo users only". As a result, we received an overwhelming amount of responses: over 300 users took part in our survey.

THE TARGET AUDIENCE

Since one of our main issues is with the current user retention rate, we decided to focus on a broader target audience of the current user who uses the app version (the most used platform). Seeing how many users Duolingo has attracted, it had no issue in that area, but we want the users to keep coming back. These new features would be inviting to new, former, and current users.

THE PROCESS

THE PRIORITY PYRAMID

To not get overwhelmed in the redesign process, we created this graphic to represent our user's focus.

THE USER FLOW MAP

Since we are redesigning from an already existing product, we created this flow map to reflect the new changes being implemented in our version and how it would interact with current features. The features in magenta are the new features we have added.

THE CURRENT INTERFACE

With redesign, we  decided to keep the current design in mind. Users felt unsatisfied with the current learning  and rewards system. While it would be nice to have other team members who  fully understand how to build the most efficient language courses, it would take time and resources we did not have.

Instead, we focused on changing these features: the current rewards which encourage in-app purchases which do not apply to the actual learning process,  a tedious health/review system, and the club feature which only let the user speak unguided to other users learning the same language.

THE INITIAL SKETCHES

This is where we began sketching out our new concepts and taking them into a developing phase. Our first iterations played with having a link to Duolingo's Tiny Cards app (an app by Duolingo that creates flash cards). 

However, we later learned it was more of a general flash card builder and did not connect with the lesson vocabulary in Duolingo's interface. We also discussed adding a daily prompt feature in addition to the pen pal page.

THE PAPER PROTOTYPE AND USER TESTING

In this phase of the design, we introduced the bare basics of the review, culture, and  pen pal section. Since Duolingo already has a supportive teaching element, we tested adding friendly speech bubbles to guide users through our new experience. Users responded positively to the feeling of having their "hand held" through the process and new/current users of Duolingo showed excitement with the addition of the culture and pen pal sections.

THE NAVIGATION EVOLUTION

Our biggest ‘aha’ moment occurred during our user testing  with the paper prototype. Almost every single  user felt confused where the iconography on the navigation led. One of the bigger struggles we faced was with our navigation tabs and trying to represent them with a pictorial image. Many of our sections dealt with more abstract ideas such as "culture" and some shared similar topics: "profile" and "pen  pal" both dealing with people.

Our solution was to add titles under each of the icons. Duolingo's original navigation only showed the title of the page you were on and people would become familiar as they used the app, but this was not intuitive. Following up on this, all confusion caused by this navigation problem was instantly cleared with our final iconography changes during our second round of user testing with our InVision prototype.

THE SKETCH MOCKUPS AND USER TESTING

Receiving decent feedback from our first round of user testing, we received the 'ok' to start fleshing out our mockups in Sketch which were tested through an InVision prototype. By creating a multi-paged prototype that does not pigeon hole users into desired choices, we received great feedback. Below are some of the preliminary designs and features.

Some changes we made from the original app without completely redoing the page is the 'Profile' page (which now includes streak count, interests, and age/location), and the 'Learn' page (centered top and bottom nav layout, and lesson tree now starts from the bottom up to match the format  of the culture map). New features we designed from scratch are the review, culture, and pen pal sections.

THE FINAL CHANGES

Our final round of user testing ended with extremely positive results. Many of the issues found were minor details which had not yet been fully refined and areas we were still working out. Bellow are some of the changes we implemented in our new pages.

THE CULTURE PAGE

For the 'Culture' map page, we completely redesigned the map to better match with the current style of the other pages and polished the popups. We also added a secondary 'level' page to the  sections since it would be impossible to reflect a whole topic of culture with one lesson. Lastly, we added a 'book' icon that allows the user to read more about these specialized vocabulary words.

THE PEN PAL PAGE

For the 'Pen Pal' page, one of our "guiding" popups explained being able to add multiple pen pals per a language. We originally planned for there to be a list of all pen pals organized by language on one page. However,  that solution would result in unclarity and disorganization on which language pen pals are available. Instead, we added a flag that allows users to switch between languages they are learning (same feature found on the 'Learn' page).

THE DEVELOPMENT

Finishing our final design refinements, we placed the app in InVision where we created our final prototype. By creating many page mockups, even ones which were not our primary focus, we are able to create an inviting and explorative interaction with our final prototype. This was important to us because we are creating from a pre-existing platform and want our new features to fit in seamlessly with what is already there.

THE OUTCOME

THE CHALLENGES

One of the main challenges we faced and  overcame was trying to make navigation intuitive to the  user. Another major challenge we thought about was how we were limited on our target audience. While  we did receive numerous responses on our survey,  they were limited by people who frequently use the internet, especially Reddit forums.

Since language is such a universal and broad topic, we also felt our international audience was not being represented. English speakers currently have the most access to different languages using Duolingo while many non-English speakers can only learn English at the time being. Lastly, approaching the culture map was quite challenging in the sense of what topics and subtopics to include without over-generalizing a country's culture.

THE REFLECTION

Looking back, this project reiterated the importance of meeting and communicating in person as a team. We truly believe if we did not spend the time and energy to have frequent meetings, we would not have accomplished as much as we set out to do. We verbally discussed and brainstormed each issue we found and our solution to overcome said issue. We found being passionate about a project was an important driving force in this lengthy process and having a partner to not only rely on, but also support, challenged and pushed us every step of  the way. Overall, we feel as though  we created a very successful prototype and truly hope additions like ours will be added to Duolingo in the near future.

FUTURE ADDITIONS

We felt very satisfied with how we left our final design prototype; however,  room for improvement always exists. If we were to continue working on this project, we believe the culture map has a high amount of potential for growth. We would make  changes to the illustration style of the culture map to match more cohesively within Duolingo's brand guidelines. We would also want to  add more topics in the  explore page . Lastly, we would want to create an even more interactive page where you  interact with the specialty vocabulary and illustrations. We want to fully embrace the game aspect people strongly desire while using Duolingo.