Duochat:
Mobile App Feature
Opportunity
Duolingo is a popular language-learning platform that offers personalized lessons in over 37 different languages. Its language learners can track their progress, earn rewards, and practice reading, writing, speaking, listening and conversation with intelligent Chatbots. There are many ways to practice, but none that extend into the real world.
Response
For this project our team developed a new feature called DuoChat which allows users to practice their conversational skills with other members of the Duolingo community.
Disclaimer: This is a concept project and has no relationship to the actual company.
My Contributions
Affinity Mapping, C&C Analysis, Persona, Wireframing
Timeline
2 Weeks
The Team
4 UX Design Students
Getting to Know Our Users
Gaining an understanding of our users to build usable engaging experiences:
Insights from our User Research
We learned that Duolingo users feel the need to make real world like interactions, to better prepare them for when they finally meet and talk with native speakers.
Survey
Gained understanding about people’s experiences with learning a new language.
User Interviews
Conducted interviews with nine people who had experience learning a second language. Gaining insight on their habits, likes, and dislikes.
Affinity Mapping
Categorizing and sort our results to look for trends amongst our users.
Introducing Bilingual Betty a Digital Nomad
With key insights, interviews, our team created a user persona, Bilingual Betty, to humanize the target audience’s goals, pain points and motivations.
Getting to Know Our Competition
We conducted a comprehensive assessment of the app's existing framework during this phase. Following this internal review, we turned our attention outward, scrutinizing the feature landscape offered by various competitors.
We researched direct and in-direct competitors to see how their lessons were structured and which unique features they offered their customers. We looked at the websites directly, but also compared online reviews that specifically mentioned features the users did and didn’t like.
What we realized was that the interaction between users always took place through a series of message boards, not actually as an in-app feature. That led us to conclude that we needed to develop a new premium feature to connect users in real time to practice their conversational skills.
Ideating the Problem
At this stage our team came together to do a design studio. We all did a series of rough sketches, compared notes, then went back to refine each of our ideas.
After a couple of rounds of sketching we started to see some common elements that we all wanted to include in our wireframes.
Testing Ideas for the New Feature
During the usability testing phase, participants were asked to log in and explore the new language exchange feature, enabling them to converse in French with a native speaker who, in turn, assisted them with their English skills.
To ensure comprehensive feedback, we employed three levels of wireframing—low, medium, and high-fidelity—conducting user testing at each stage. The tasks were deliberately concise to pinpoint how participants perceived each aspect of the new feature. Adjustments were made at each stage based on valuable user feedback.
Notably, we encountered numerous inquiries about even the most fundamental aspects of the feature. Balancing the need to educate users while maintaining simplicity posed a challenge. Additionally, determining feature priorities for the initial sprint presented a complex task that required careful consideration.
Our Solution
In the end we were able to come up with what we feel is a strong foundation for a new feature for Duolingo.
Once we decided which path we wanted to pursue, we realized there were so many options and ways we could proceed. We really had to cut our deliverable down to make it the minimum viable product.
We viewed this project as a launching off point for a new feature with the potential for extensive growth. Given time, we would want to add additional safety features such as AI moderation, but also options for building community such as choosing which proficiency level to have a conversation with or having the ability to to chat with a friend.
Practice in
Real Time
Practice real world conversations with other Duolingo Users
Correct each other and learn.
Easy to use recording features
Real World
Conversations
Voice-to-text translations
Record corrections
Listen and Replay
Get Matched with
Real People
Choose your chat duration time
Choose common interaction scenarios
Practice your chosen language
