Duolingo
Learning with Duopal
Duolingo uses a gamified learning approach to make language learning fun and engaging. However, Duolingo struggles with retaining users beyond the first few weeks of usage and has faced criticism for the effectiveness of its language courses in achieving fluency in a language.
Duolingo recognizes its limitations in providing users with conversational practice. Its voice recognition feature and AI chatbots fall short in providing users with the tools they need to reach oral proficiency. Duolingo wants to leverage community to create language immersive experiences that will ultimately help its users master fluency
The goal of our research was first to research about the business to keep in mind our boundaries, conduct user research to be able to empathize with the users, and lastly run comparative analysis to get an idea of what new feature we wanted to bring to the table.
The business goal of Duolingo is to make language learning accessible, free and fun to anyone using a web and mobile based platform, while generating revenue through ads, offering a premium subscription service with additional features, and selling language proficiency tests to companies and educational institutions.
The goal of the interview was to learn how and why people learn foreign languages, as well as what challenges they face. The team remotely interviewed 4 users that have studied foreign language.
Some of key insights from user interview were
My team created two personas because our user research showed that users learn a foreign language because of various reasons such as family, business or culture.
"Users need a way to put themselves in real life situations because they do not feel that they are ready to hold a conversation with another speaker."
We also wanted to do additional research to get ideas on how I want to approach the problem and possibly get inspiration from competitors. The goal was to get ideas on how we wanted to approach the problem and analyze how other non-direct competitors were doing to help their users learn language.
As shown above, Duolingo lacked many features that other companies were already providing. So we wanted to incorporate some of those highlighted features.
With all the insights that my team gathered through user research and comparative analysis, we were able to ideate several ideas for potential solutions.
The reason our team decided not to go with these ideas were because of time constraints and some ideas had too many factors to consider.
Below, is the design system we used, since it was Duolingo's feature, we followed Duolingo's design system.
With the wireframe and prototype set up, we ran a usability test and gathered 14 responses.
We have also added a partner review page for safety of our users.
Based on the insights we gathered from the usability tests, we were able to implement changes to our prototype.
I led the design of the desktop version, but our primary version was the mobile version.
We have also focused on accessibility because Duolingo's goal is to make language learning accessible to everyone.
For our next steps we plan to implement the option for voice chat so users can practice and improve their vocabulary, grammar and pronunciations. Also, adding more features for those with vision impairment such as the ability to change the size of the text for easier reading. Also, an in-app dictionary to help users articulate their conversations. Finally, we plan to continue testing and developing these features to make adjustments where needed.
This was my first group project and I learned that collaboration needs effort and incorporating different perspectives into the entire process is difficult but a key to great design. The team also had one teammate absent for few days so me and the other teammate did not want to leave him behind so we constantly communicated with him to follow up on the things we did, and to make important design decisions along the way of user research and the design process. I was very happy that my team communicated constantly with each other and through everyone's dedication and the hard work, the team got to learn a lot, especially the importance of communication and being a team player.
