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Down the wrong path: the disaster of the latest Duolingo UI update
The world’s largest language learning platform recently rolled out a major update to its 50M active monthly users. The new “path UI” aims to simplify the learning experience, but it comes with some major usability flaws.
I have been using Duolingo for almost a decade, which is long enough to remember that Duo didn’t always look as cute as today. Over this time, the platform underwent major changes, most of which seemed a little annoying at first, but grew on me quickly. However, I believe the 2022 release is a major step in a wrong direction.
The major selling point of the new interface is its simplicity. The learning path brings together exercises, stories and personalised practice blocks into a single linear feed, so the user can hop from one task to the next without needing to navigate multiple tabs choosing what to practice.
First of all, things aren’t this simple. While my feed now has a variety of exercises, I still have a separate Practice Hub tab with additional workouts, speaking and listening tasks, and stories (which are similar to the old stories, except my progress on these has been reset). There are unit rewinds and mistake reviews too, with no obvious links to the units and exercises in my feed. Ah, there also used to be a tab with audio content and podcasts, which is now simply gone.
To simplify things further, Duolingo did away with the skill levels. In the old interface, you had to complete 5–6 exercise sets (or do a test to skip a level) to earn a crown and progress to the next level, until reaching gold, which you could upgrade to platinum by completing further tests. Complicated, I know. This meant that a learner would need to complete around 40 rounds of exercises (15–20 tasks each) to “master” a skill, which is fair from a learning perspective and incredibly daunting from a usability point of view.
