Duolingo: como eles acertaram em cheio em seu produto e se tornaram o aplicativo educacional #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. ✨

Com base em sua missão, o Duolingo vem atraindo usuários, funcionários e investidores desde então.

É claro que, para sobreviver, o Duolingo teve que ganhar dinheiro de alguma forma. Eles escolheram fazer isso com base em anúncios, assinaturas mensais que removem os anúncios, compras no aplicativo e o Duolingo English Test.

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

Eles acreditavam que o software era perfeitamente adequado para oferecer uma experiência personalizada a cada aluno 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. 👍

Como você pode fazer isso acontecer?

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.

Isso contrasta fortemente com o outro grande software de aprendizado de idiomas existente no mercado: Rosetta Stone. Apenas um pouco mais de 1/4 de sua equipe trabalha nesses mesmos departamentos (com base nos dados do 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. 💪

Elas despertam mais interesse nas pesquisas, de acordo com o Google.

E fazem sua empresa crescer a uma taxa muito maior, de acordo com o 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. 🌟

Três objetivos, três equipes do Duolingo: aprendizado, crescimento e monetização

Para o Duolingo, o comportamento correto do usuário significa:

• Aprendizagem: as pessoas têm mais sucesso no aprendizado
• Crescimento: mais pessoas aprendem
• Monetização: mais receita é gerada para apoiar sua 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 equipe é responsável por melhorar a métrica vinculada à sua meta específica, organizando experimentos de produto.

5 Experimentos com produtos Duolingo

A página inicial do Duolingo já dá uma boa ideia de algumas das maneiras pelas quais seu produto foi criado para incitar o comportamento correto do usuário.

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. 💪

O poder da sequência na retenção é tão forte que a equipe do Duolingo passa muito tempo otimizando-a. Isso dificulta a perda da sequência e torna mais fácil recuperá-la por meio de alguns exercícios.

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/ Notificações

Além disso, a equipe conseguiu melhorar as conversões em relação às notificações em cerca de 5% apenas alterando a cópia e testando 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.”

Em termos de tempo, a equipe descobriu que 23,5 horas após a sessão de aprendizado anterior era o melhor momento para lembrar as pessoas de fazer a próxima sessão, pois as pessoas geralmente aprendem no mesmo momento do dia.

4/ Crachás

Um aspecto clássico de gamificação que a equipe do Duolingo acrescentou são os distintivos.

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, …

A primeira versão do sistema de emblemas por si só (mesmo sem níveis de emblemas, ou seja, as estrelas na captura de tela acima) já aumentou os usuários ativos diários em 2,4%.

Mas também estimulou um comportamento positivo muito específico: aumentou as compras na loja do Duolingo em 13% e aumentou a quantidade de amigos adicionados em 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. 🚀

O Duolingo continua a organizar experimentos de produtos

O Duolingo entende que interromper seu processo de aprimoramento significa ficar parado. E ficar parado significa fracassar no 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.

Para manter o controleO Duolingo adiciona a lista de experimentos ao JIRA. (Observação: use o que funcionar. No Salesflare, usamos o GitHub para isso em vez do JIRA).

Para priorizar, eles têm duas regras simples de priorização de custo-benefício:

1. What’s the impacto potencial do experimento? A equipe do Duolingo até decidiu que experimentos com um impacto inferior a 1% não valem a pena.
2. Quanto tempo levará para executar os experimentos?

Por fim, ao planejar, eles fazem uma escolha consistente de não ignorar os pequenos experimentos em favor dos 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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