Mock interview: Duolingo App critique

Duolingo is a language learning app that strives for providing the best language learning experience for its users. According to Duolingo’s official website, there are three key components within their mission statement: “personalized education”, “making learning fun”, “universally accessible”.

Images provided by Duolingo

As the host, Peggy chose to use Duolingo as the interview topic and assigned it to two presenters 5 minutes before the interview. She conducted the whole process with two presenters and tracked more questions in real-time based on the presenters’ answers.

First, let’s see why Peggy chose the application Duolingo and what questions she is going to ask.

My questions are designed to assess the presenters/interviewees ability to analyze and critique the app while always keeping the app’s target users in mind as well as the ability to connect the solutions on the app with Duolingo’s business goals.

Selected questions:

• Can you walk me through the onboarding process?
• Who do you think would be the target user of this app?
• From what you see, how does Duolingo keep language learners motivated and interested?
• What interesting features do you think that can be added to the app to increase user usage?
• How is the process of creating a profile?
• Please explore all nav tabs and tell me what the information architecture of this app is?
• Can you talk about the business goal for Duolingo?

In a 20-minute one-on-one interview with Peggy, our first presenter Yutong gave a concise, structured and thoughtful answer.

Now let’s see what Yutong wants to share about her interview:

The general format that I adopt during this critique session is:

1. Tell the host everything you see
2. Your opinion as a professional designer
3. Think out loud critically
4. Mention anything that surprised/confused you
5. Takeaway/Thoughts?

I was asked to go through the onboarding process and share my thoughts about it. While I never tried the new Duolingo, I could still talk about everything that I saw during the process. Above all, you have to make sure you and the host are synced.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that App Critique is less about your personal feeling. Try to talk about if the process is user-friendly rather than if you think Spanish is too hard for you! The interviewer would like to see if you are sensitive to minor usability issues, speculate about others’ design decisions, and propose yours.

For example: Here Duolingo asked about the language that I want to learn more about. It is nice that I can see a list of choices from Spanish all the way to languages that I have never seen before. (Tell the host everything you see) However, I am not sure if this is the best way to present a number of languages as the list can get extremely long. (Anything that confused you) On the other hand, I would appreciate more user freedom so that people can search for the language that they want to learn. (Your Opinion as a professional designer & Think out loud critically) If we assume that Duolingo ranks language by popularity, people will tend to click the first few choices, which may not be a big problem. (Thoughts)

After listening to Yutong’s own thoughts on the interview, let’s take a look at Yue Jiang, an evaluator who pays close attention to the performance of the host and presenter.

Let us see if the evaluator will share more views and insights with us.

Interact with interviewers

Usually, in our practice, some of us didn’t communicate enough with interviewers but focused on our own thoughts too much. However, interviewers, who are listening to your stories, might find it hard to follow sometimes; or, they might have some questions in their minds. It would make things more collaborative if interviewees are able to interact with hosts from time to time and make sure they are on the same page; or even, ask for hosts’ preference.

For example, when Yutong viewed the long list of languages on the first screen of onboarding, she asked the host if she has any preference for these languages or it is OK to choose a language randomly. It is a great way to involve the host into the conversation and motivate her to listen carefully in the following part.

Use proper wordings

In the critique process, Yutong usually used wordings like “ I assume…”, “I am curious”, “It must be built on their research but …”, All these wordings help build the vibe of “exploration and critique” but not “judge”. I held the view that most design decisions in apps, especially those popular ones, have gone through long discussion among design teams. It would be better if we can critique these applications in a suggestive way when explaining our own thoughts.

Put yourself in the sight of a designer

I realized that It is super easy to assume ourselves as users when doing app critiques. However, in an app critique, the host may want interviewees to critique “how these design decisions help users have a better experience” from the designer perspective. Yutong did a nice job here. She expressed her own opinions on specific design decisions first and explained its impact on users.

Explain the logic behind screens

Instead of going through each element on the screen, interviewees can also improve their skills in app critique by explaining more on “reasons” underneath. It was impressive when Yutong mentioned gamification when she views the visual languages and interactive patterns in Duolingo. She noticed the reason behind the design and also explained how Duolingo gamify the experience for users.

Now it’s our second presenter, Shaonan, who is about to critique the application Duolingo as well. The host will arrange different questions for her.

Let us see how Shaonan thinks of the just ended interview.

Q 1：“Please go create your profile, and tell me how is the process?”

Takeaways: As I complete inputting the information and get the profile done, there is a pop-up window encouraging users to make in-app purchases and set up a “Plus” plan. I thought it was not related to the current question “create your profile”, so I didn’t get to explore this “Plus” and skip it at that time. When I look back I realize I ignore the reason why this “Plus” plan is among the process of creating a new profile. I should have critiqued on whether having this “Plus” plan here is reasonable or not. If it is reasonable, then how do the “Plus” functions encourage users to set up a plan? If it is not reasonable, what would be a better alternative to adopt this plan?

Another thing I haven’t paid attention to is why Duolingo does not have this creating profile at the very beginning as expected. Instead, the app asks users to select the language as soon as they open this app, and followed by a question as if you are a beginner or not. After picking a goal you would immediately get dropped into the first lesson. I should have been talking about why this “play first” and “profile second” UX strategy is good for learning apps.

From a visual perspective, Duolingo adopts gamification along with all features, they make everything fun and playful, which encourages users to get started and keep learning. But for creating profile pages, they make the designs simple and basic. It would be good if I noticed these design differences suggesting Duolingo tries to get you back to learning courses as soon as possible.

To sum up, I should follow the questions being asked, at the same time, try to think about everything I encountered as completing the task. Try not to skip any page without exploring.

Q 2: “Please explore all nav tabs and tell me what the information architecture of this app is?”

Takeaways: I took this question as “Explore all nav tabs”, while actually, this question was about “ Is the information architecture reasonable? Can you tell me something about that through exploring nav tabs?” or “How do you think the five nav tabs interact with each other?”

As I dig deeper, I express what I see and what I feel. While I should have focused on if the flow is intuitive enough for first-time users. I should have set up the site map as soon as I know I’m going to critique Duolingo.

I spend most of the time exploring the meaning of the unique expressions (such as leaderboard, streak, crown, etc.) As I review the interview, I figure those expressions are the equivalent of several common functions for a language learning app. Duolingo only adopts those expressions in a gamified way to attract users.

Q 3: “Can you talk about the business goal for Duolingo?”

Takeaways: The first important thing we should keep in mind is that a business goal is all about money. This question could be mistaken as the mission of this app or the purpose of users to use it. If we come across this question, we can break it down into three points.

• What additional functions will be enabled for a “Plus” plan?
• How does a better user experience increase daily active users?
• How effective is their new user invitation system?

For instance, we can mention that Duolingo applied the “delayed signup”, “rewarding system”, “gamification” to keep and increase daily active users. By talking about those, we can actually extend this topic to “How does the app keep the users motivated to learn a new language?” It is always good to initiate more insights before being asked.

After listening to Shaonan’s interview, our evaluator Bowen wanted to share the thoughts she would answer if someone asked her the same question.

Let’s hear Bowen’s alternative views on how to keep the Duolingo’s business goals in mind and make it run through many of the questions.

It’s quite a common problem for app critique beginners to talk a lot about what they see and what their actions are when they are asked to critique an app. However, app critique focuses more on how you feel about the app from an interaction designer’s view and to evaluate the user experience under different user scenarios. One question that Shaonan has been asked was “talk about the information architecture of Duolingo”, she answered this question by exploring different navigation tabs and explaining the detailed information under each tab. The better answer may include elaborating on the business objectives of the app, then discussing the general structure of the app, and how that relates to the business goals and user goals. Shaonan can also pick one main page to discuss in detail the information architecture of that page and some design decisions (her own assumptions) that why Duolingo makes those choices, and how do users feel about using the app, are there any improvements on those features. This is a good structure for answering information architecture questions.

Therefore, it’s important to critique an app during the app critique session rather than sharing the experience. It’s important to combine with business and user goals to analyze the application from interaction and user experience point of view.

Last but not least…

This is our second try to mock the app critique in a real-time interview, this role-playing approach looks very effective. By playing the different roles each time, everyone needs to interact with the presenter throughout the process. It can not only help us to perceive some of the interviewer’s mistakes but also inspire us how to spontaneously cover more insights as an interviewer in the future. In addition, it helps us better understand what content may be very concerned by the interviewer.

By Olga Gurova

I hope our reflections and comments are able to give you some inspirations on preparing app critique interviews. If you particularly want to hear critiques about which app, please feel free to comment here! ;)