Duolingo: cómo dieron en el clavo con su producto y se convirtieron en la aplicación educativa #1

Duolingo’s mission: making language education personalized, fun and universally accessible

Faced by the inequalities of traditional education, especially in his hometown of Guatemala city, Duolingo’s co-founder Luis von Ahn, felt like something needed a change. 🧐

He figured that, particularly in poorer countries, education was broken. People who have money can get top education, while people who don’t have money barely know how to read and write. And because of that, don’t make any money. A vicious circle. 😔

Luis saw there was language learning software out there, like Rosetta Stone, but it was prohibitively expensive, and it therefore didn’t help to close the education gap.

That’s when Duolingo was born, promising free language learning to everyone. Accessible to everyone who wants to learn. ✨

Basándose en su misión, Duolingo no ha dejado de atraer usuarios, empleados e inversores desde entonces.

Por supuesto, para sobrevivir, Duolingo tenía que ganar dinero por algún lado. Eligieron hacerlo a base de anuncios, suscripciones mensuales que eliminan los anuncios, compras in-app y el Duolingo English Test.

And besides making it universally accessible, they also focused on making the learning personalized and fun. 😍

Creían que el software era perfecto para ofrecer una experiencia personalizada a cada estudiante de idiomas.

And that language learning should be less boring and more like a fun game. Who’d want to come back to a language learning app otherwise? 😉

A product organization, focused on design and data

Universally accessible, personalized and fun. Sounds great. 👍

Ahora bien, ¿cómo conseguirlo?

Duolingo’s strategy is to relentlessly improve its product design to incite the right user behavior based on data. 👈

And they mean it. More than 3/4 of Duolingo’s team works on engineering, design, product or research.

Esto contrasta con el otro gran software de aprendizaje de idiomas: Rosetta Stone. Solo algo más de 1/4 de su equipo trabaja en estos mismos departamentos (según datos de LinkedIn Premium).

It’s the classic battle: product organization v.s. marketing-sales organization.

And if you investigate Rosetta Stone v.s. Duolingo growth, Duolingo’s product strategy proves to be superior. 💪

Consiguen más interés en las búsquedas según Google.

Y hacen crecer su empresa a un ritmo mucho mayor, según LinkedIn.

As a mathematician and computer scientist, Duolingo’s co-founder Luis von Ahn did not always believe in the power of product design.

But now, when asked for the most life changing book he’s ever read, he’d tell you it’s “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman. Since he’s read the book, he’s obsessed with how products are designed.

And as a team lead by scientists, Duolingo doesn’t just improve design based on personal feelings. It uses data as its guiding star. 🌟

Tres objetivos, tres equipos de Duolingo: aprendizaje, crecimiento y monetización

Para Duolingo, el comportamiento correcto del usuario significa:

• AprenderLas personas tienen más éxito en el aprendizaje
• Crecimientomás personas aprenden
• Monetizaciónse generan más ingresos para apoyar su causa

That’s why Duolingo decided to create three teams to work on these three goals: a learning team, a growth team and a monetization team. 💡

Cada equipo es responsable de mejorar las métricas vinculadas a su objetivo específico organizando experimentos de producto.

5 experimentos con productos Duolingo

La página de inicio de Duolingo ya da una buena idea de algunas de las formas en que su producto está construido para incitar el comportamiento adecuado del usuario.

The fact that the software doesn’t even use “hearts” anymore, and doesn’t mention badges or its in-app coach “Duo”, is a clear example of how quick and often Duolingo runs product experiments to improve the product.

Here’s 5 notable experiments and the concrete impact they had. 👇

1/ Delayed signup

The Duolingo team found that by allowing users to sign up later and experience some Duolingo lessons first, it could boost the amount of daily active users by 20%. 💥

Based on these experiments the team introduced “soft walls”. Those are optional pages that ask people to sign up, but still allow them to hit “Later”.

Finally, after a series of lessons, there’s a “hard wall” that requires users to sign up. 🛑 The team found that the performance of this wall was actually also improved by the presence of the “soft walls” as users were already primed to sign up.

In the process of introducing the “soft walls”, Duolingo made a mistake it later had to correct: the team created a big red “Discard my progress” button. What it found later is that this button actually invited people to click on it instead of scaring them from clicking. Replacing it afterwards with a more subtle grey “Later” button made performance shoot up.

The team was able to improve daily active users by another 8.2% with these subsequent experiments. An extremely significant amount. 😲

2/ Streak

Another important product aspect the Duolingo team experimented with a lot, is the concept of the “streak”, which it borrowed from the gaming industry.

That means: if a user uses Duolingo for x consecutive days he or she builds up a streak. Users start feeling invested and they try not to break this streak. They reward persistence. 🎁

I’m personally on a 152 day streak right now and it’s my best motivation to keep going. 💪

El poder de la racha sobre la retención es tan fuerte que el equipo de Duolingo dedica mucho tiempo a optimizarla. Principalmente hace que sea más difícil perder la racha y que sea más fácil recuperarla haciendo algunos ejercicios.

The team introduced “weekend amulets”, “streak repair”, “streak freeze”, … so that people can make up for their human failures. Introducing the amulet alone was responsible for a 4% increase in 14 day retention. ✨

3/ Notificaciones

Además, el equipo pudo mejorar las conversiones con respecto a las notificaciones en aproximadamente 5% solo cambiando el copy y probando diferentes timings.

One of the most famous copy experiments is this passive aggressive notification: “Hi! It’s Duo. These reminders don’t seem to be working. We’ll stop sending them for now.”

En cuanto al momento, el equipo descubrió que 23,5 horas después de su última sesión de aprendizaje era el mejor momento para recordar a la gente que hiciera su siguiente sesión, ya que la gente suele aprender en el mismo momento del día.

4/ Insignias

Un aspecto clásico de gamificación que ha añadido el equipo de Duolingo son las insignias.

Badges display the user behavior Duolingo wants to promote. This includes: spending lingots (Duolingo’s virtual currency), starting wagers, keeping streaks, learning during weekends, being active in Duolingo’s built-in language clubs, …

La primera versión del sistema de insignias por sí sola (incluso sin niveles de insignias, es decir, las estrellas en la captura de pantalla anterior) ya aumentó los usuarios activos diarios en 2,4%.

Pero también estimuló un comportamiento positivo muy específico: aumentó las compras en la tienda de Duolingo en 13% y aumentó la cantidad de amigos añadidos en 116%.

5/ In-app coach

One of the more controversial experiments within the Duolingo team was the introduction of the in-app coach called “Duo”, the supportive owl mascot. Some team members loved it, some disliked it and found it annoying.

Personal tastes aside, the guiding data star is always right. 🌟

The introduction of Duo improved 14 day retention by 7.2%. Almost as big a success as the badges. 🚀

Duolingo sigue alineando experimentos de productos

Duolingo entiende que detener su proceso de mejora significa quedarse parado. Y quedarse quieto significa fracasar al final.

On the other hand, there’s an infinite amount of product experiments one can run and mindlessly starting experiments can prove to be a total waste of time.

That’s why the Duolingo team diligently keeps track of all possible product experiments, prioritizes them, and then plans them in accordingly.

A controlarDuolingo añade la lista de experimentos a JIRA. (Nota: Utiliza lo que funcione. En Salesflare, utilizamos GitHub para esto en lugar de JIRA).

Para priorizar, disponen de 2 sencillas reglas de priorización coste-beneficio:

1. What’s the impacto potencial del experimento? El equipo de Duolingo ha decidido incluso que los experimentos con un impacto inferior a 1% no merecen la pena.
2. ¿Cuánto tiempo tardará? para realizar los experimentos?

Por último, a la hora de planificar, optan sistemáticamente por no ignorar los pequeños experimentos en favor de los grandes. They believe that it’s the succession of an enormous amount of tiny improvements that leads to big results.

Way to go, Duolingo! 🙌 Keep going strong on your awesome mission.

The Salesflare team loves you. 😍

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