Staying motivated on Duolingo with good UX
How content can be designed to develop user motivation.
We’ve all been there before. You’re excited to learn a new language because you’re preparing for a trip or have aspirations of moving abroad. You fire up Duolingo and start strong, picking up new words and sentences with relative ease. After a few days you proudly go up to your friends and say “Kyou no tenki wa ii desu ne?” much to their confusion.
And then, somewhere along the way, it stops. You lose momentum and learning grinds to a halt. You wonder what happened and the excuses start forming in your mind. “I’ve been really busy at work,” “I’ve got too many things going on right now,” “The new season of … just dropped and I need to see what happens.” Whatever motivation you once had is gone and Duolingo remains closed, day after day.
Learning a language is hard. I’ve experienced it both as a student and as an ESL teacher. It asks people to invest a lot of effort into a payoff they won’t see for a while. Throughout that journey are plenty of opportunities for motivation to wane and for students to drop-off. To combat this, Duolingo and other Language Learning Apps (LLA) are designed to be as sticky and addictive as possible, habituating learning and hooking users with streaks, rewards, and fun animations. While these tactics may work in the short term, many students struggle with sustaining their motivation over the long haul.
Now a designer, I want to discover what Duolingo and other LLAs could do to help their users build their motivation. I interviewed 5 people about their language learning experiences and here were the most common themes that arose:
- Having a goal or purpose
- Motivation through proficiency
- Content variation
From these themes, I decided to focus on how content could be designed and interacted with in different ways to positively affect motivation. It should be noted that the suggestions that follow would be supplementary to Duolingo’s learning tree rather than being replacements.
The use of games
A feeling shared among my interviewees was the desire to learn through games. Games provide an enjoyable experience and doubles as a refreshing change of pace from the usual lessons. Users are able to apply what they’ve learned, solidifying their language skills and developing a sense of accomplishment. Associating language learning with fun helps users stay motivated and has them coming back for more.
Mini-games, such as card matching, would fit right into Duolingo. Students can compete against Duo to see who can find the most pairs of matching cards. This adds a layer of strategy and challenge to create an engaging way for users to review the vocabulary they’ve learned.
As users progress through their tree, word games can become unlocked. Crosswords, word searches, and word generation games continue to challenge and hook users when they grow tired of flashcard style exercises.
Using real examples of the language
Touching on the second theme from the research, all but one of my interviewees told me how developing language proficiency positively affected their motivation. By understanding the target language as it appeared naturally in the world, they saw themselves making progress, building confidence and validating the time and effort they put into learning. Duolingo and other LLAs can do the same, bolstering user motivation through the integration of real uses of the target language.
A simple starting point could be using signs. These can be easy to grasp for beginners because many of them include pictograms that we’re already familiar with. Learning to read signs is also useful for users who intend to travel abroad. The alignment of user purpose, proficiency, situational context, and practicality makes this an intriguing idea to explore. Moreover, it easily fits into the multiple-choice and fill in the blank format LLA’s are already using.
Later on, other examples such as ads, menus, audio snippets, and articles can be used. When used in tandem with the learning tree, users are immediately shown the practicality of what they’ve just learned, reinforcing the material and building motivation to learn more.
Keeping students engaged
Listening, reading, translation, spelling. These are some of the foundational pillars of language learning to which students are well acquainted with. The difference between boredom and engagement when doing these exercises can be as simple as changing how the content is presented. Leaning into games and using real examples of language provides some wonderful opportunities to keep students motivated to learn. While these changes may not be enough to pull me away from my latest craze on Netflix, they would keep me coming back, day after day.
