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Duolingo’s onboarding testing — what’s stuck?

What’s changed since 2022? Personalisation, animation and speed.

Rosie Hoggmascall
UX Collective
9 min readSep 6, 2024

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Image of Duo the bird singing

Last year, I wrote about how Duolingo converts freemium users. It was one of my best articles of all time on Medium and was super fun to write.

Screenshot of the performance of my last Duo article

I’ve been meaning to do a re-visit for while now, especially seeing as I have screenshots that date back to 2022. When I found the old screenshots I thought:

What. A. Treat.

There’s so much that’s changed, and there’s a lot that has stayed. Which indicates that certain parts are working whilst others are continuing to improve — propelling the business to incredible financial results.

Before diving into the UX, time for a recap of Duolingo’s 2018 growth slump, what they changed and how the business is doing now.

Hint: pretty damn well.

Duolingo’s growth slowdown, reversed

Back in 2018, Duolingo was seeing single-digit user growth each year. They’d not grown retention for four years and…

Published in UX Collective

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Written by Rosie Hoggmascall

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Responses (6)

What are your thoughts?

I am on my 324 streak. It hasn't been the easiest ride but I keep pushing.

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Im on my 74th streak 😎

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Thanks for sharing this one!
Always happy to have good news about Duo -
where the language learning journey started for me (and probably most of us?), but ended rather abruptly after 177 days :)

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