New feature to Duolingo
Bringing back 'penpals' to help students practice languages with real people
Introduction
Duolingo is a free app to learn languages. It offers more than 35 languages to over 1.2 billion users. They want to make education available to everyone, and also gamification makes it all fun!
But it’s not too fun to study alone. It’s really boring. Everyone’s feeling more lonely with covid, there’s no motivation to study. It's always the same way, the same lessons...
So to help regain motivation and confidence, I present a new feature called Messages. It is a feature to talk to your old and new friends through text and video. With it you can build friendships, connect people and learn together.
1. Research and Competitive Analysis
Interviews
In order to define the user, and understand their needs and pain points, 8 people were interviewed.
With all the insights, I created an affinity diagram to group similar issues.
Then I identified the pain points and the main needs, and did a Value Proposition Canvas. I included the value considering the insights about the possibility of this new feature, and also changed the color for cards that the feature already exists, or that would impact in the goal of the app.
During the interviews, they said:
“We don’t have communication with real people."
“I’m ashamed to talk to someone that may judge my mistakes.”
“It is difficult to learn how to express yourself.”
Survey
I did a survey and got 17 responses. From there, I came across with these numbers:
82% uses apps to learn languages;
85% uses Duolingo;
but 78% never completed a course!
Competitors
For the competitors, I’ve compared Duolingo with iTalki, Babbel, Memrise , Rosetta Stone and Busuu, in aspects like: free and private lessons, tests, study material, friends feature, price and gamification.
2. User Personas and User Stories
I wrote user stories to two kinds of user: one is a regular student, and the other is a student/teacher, which means that it would have an active role in an educational collaborative feature.
As I mentioned, the first persona is just a “Regular student”. She wants to get a boost of motivation to continue her studies by finding new friends to connect.
The second persona is a ”Student that would teach”. She is willing to talk to other people to practice more with real, native speakers, learn more about their culture, and also teach them about her own.
This is the user journey, considering the happy path just using the new feature.
You open the app, go to main screen, click on messages, choose someone from Friends (that can be from Facebook or the ones you have already added) or Community (a random peer that is also learning with Duolingo). You can then text and or video call, and when you’re finished, just close it.
3. Sketching and Iterations
I’ve noticed that Duolingo has a lot of illustrations and unique symbols, so I decided to go almost straight to Figma in order to make it more understandable to the testers.
I started by drawing the main screen, where I could decide where the button to the new feature would be placed. Also designed a simple messaging screen, based on other apps, and included the video call button. Then I started designing the screens in between.
During tests, I realised that I had to change the calling screen. I thought of an option to cancel it (if you called by mistake), but this button was not intuitive, as it seemed to have two areas to click.
In the list of friends and community, there were issues about where to click to check the profile and how to add friends, and more than that, what’s the goal for each screen and how the user could identify it.
By changing the symbol to a plus, the testers could successfully add someone.
In the video chat screen, when asked to end the call, some testers clicked in the arrow to minimise the screen. But on the next screen, it all became clear.
Then, time to add colours, and work on some components, pop up screens, so that all the interactions could connect properly until the final version was built.
4. Final Prototype
After all the iterations and tests, this was my proposal at the end of one week of work. You can check the final result in the video below.
4. What's next?
For the next steps, I thought of allowing people to shop private classes with real licensed teachers, or even trade it for duo lingo money.
To help the conversations, i’d like to provide icebreakers and topics on the chat screen. File exchange too, so you can send pictures or more material to study.
I came across a little issue after it was almost done. When you reach a certain milestone during your course, there’s something called “Stories”, which are little texts to practice reading. At this same moment, it would be good to unlock my new feature too, so that you know at least the basics to practice conversation.
If that happens, the navigation bar would have six icons, and google material design recommends from three to five icons due to code, size of icon and clickable area.
So my suggestion for the new one is moving the profile icon to the top (where it is in most of the applications). And then I show the moment where both features are unlocked, with a quick explanation of what it is, so the user can be more confident in testing it.
What would you do differently? Let me know in the comments! :)
