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Duolingo’s onboarding testing — what’s stuck?

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

Christie Tang
UX Collective
Published in
12 min readApr 25, 2020

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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…

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Christie Tang

Product Designer at Meta. Jury at Awwwards. eSports enthusiast. Bonafide nerd. Ketogenic foodie. Sarcastic and crass INTJ. Design casually explained.

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