Product Breakdown: 3 Learnings from the Duolingo App

Product Breakdown analyzes a different product every week and lists noteworthy product and UX learnings. We believe that the best way to master good product practices is to learn from others.

Intro

Duolingo is a free app designed to help you learn a new language. The app has won numerous awards, from Apple’s app of the year to the Crunchies award.

1. Onboarding does not include signing up!

At a time when most phone apps launch with a slideshow tutorial and a forced sign-up, Duolingo’s onboarding is refreshingly quick. You simply select a language that you want to learn, tell the app whether you want to spend 5, 10, 15, or 20 mins a day learning this language, and you’re off to your first lesson! In fact, Duolingo doesn’t ask you to sign up at all until after the first lesson, when it asks you to save your progress.

Duolingo’s on-boarding throws you straight into the first lesson! Most apps would have asked you to sign-up by the second step.

Holding off on sign-up allows Duolingo to ensure you’re invested in the app before asking you to sign-up. The tradeoff is that Duolingo might not get the emails of some customers which it can use to bring customers back. However, Duolingo probably realized that letting people experience the app ASAP is the best way to ensure their retention.

This sign-up screen does not come up until AFTER the first lesson!

Other apps could benefit from this approach as well. For example, the Airbnb app asks you to sign up on first launch. However, if Airbnb is optimizing for maximum bookings, it could let users explore places to stay, and hold off on signing up until the user tries to book.

2. Gamification to keep you motivated

The Duolingo app has elements of game design at every step. Did you just complete a lesson? Here are some “experience points” and a chart of how you’re doing this week. Want to skip a lesson? Take this quiz where you have 3 lives, and each mistake costs you a life. Are you on a successful streak? Earn a “lingot” that you can spend in the app to get “power-ups”. There’s even a leaderboard to compare how you’re doing against friends.

The psychology of game design is known to be a powerful motivating factor and it is good to see an education app leverage this to help you learn.

Gamification is everywhere!

3. Bite-sized lessons are optimized for consumption during breaks — like your morning commute.

Duolingo is optimized for bite-sized consumption. The app asks you if you want to spend just 5, 10, 15, or 20 minutes a day learning a language (and it calls 2o mins/day “insane mode”). By keeping lessons short, the app ensures that you don’t view language learning as a long, tiring task. It also allows you to complete an entire lesson during breaks in your day — like your morning commute.

Bite-sized lessons are optimized for short breaks. 20 min/day is considered “Insane”!

We’ve seen a few other apps take this “limited content” approach, such as the Yahoo News Digest app, which limits you to the 9 most-important news articles in a day. For tasks like learning a language, or catching up with world news — which can be a chore for some — short-bursts where you make clear progress can be a good way to ensure long-term user retention.

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