Duolingo Chats

Video chat app that allows language learners to practice their speaking skills

My role: Product Designer + Project Lead

Collaborators: Kim Au Lee, Darya Svensson

Type: Conceptual

Timeline: 2 weeks

Overview: Duolingo Chats is a conceptual “sister app” to Duolingo that my team designed to allow language learners to converse with real people. Our iOS app enables language learners of all fluency levels to partner with another speaker and practice their speaking skills. This was a project from my bootcamp course, with the problem and goal of designing an app assigned to our team.

THE PROBLEM

Duolingo doesn’t support conversational practice between users

Project prompt: Duolingo recognizes its limitations in providing users with conversational practice. Its voice recognition feature and AI chatbots fall short in providing users with the tools they need to reach oral proficiency. Duolingo wants to leverage community to create language immersive experiences that will ultimately help its users master fluency.

THE SOLUTION

Meet Duolingo Chats

1. Choose partner fluency

4. View profile

2. Choose conversation topic

5. Video chat

3. Choose partner

6. Leave feedback

USER RESEARCH

What do language learners need to converse virtually?

Our team first surveyed 15 language learners of all levels to identify broad themes. From this pool of respondents, we then conducted 8 user interviews to ask more specific questions and help shape our personas. We wanted to answer the following questions:

  1. What are the biggest challenges when learning a new language?

  2. How do user challenges and needs change as fluency increases?

  3. Who uses virtual language learning tools such as Duolingo, and why?

  4. What do people like and dislike about the existing Duolingo app?

  5. What do people need in order to have a good conversation virtually?

  6. How can we make the (Duolingo) experience more human and interactive?

Key research learnings and user quotes

  1. Duolingo limits the advancement of its users by not enabling live conversations

  2. Language learners seek structure and guidance when practicing their speaking skills

  3. Beginner language learners want to converse with other beginners

  4. Advanced language learners want to converse with native or fluent speakers

Differences between beginner and advanced learners inspired our personas

BRAINSTORMING

What capabilities are necessary to support video conversations between language learners?

I led a feature prioritization exercise called “MosCOW,” where we ranked features into four buckets: must have, should have, could have, and won’t have. For each capability we ranked, we considered the needs and challenges of our two personas. Once we determined the capabilities for the app, we sketched our initial ideas.

WIREFRAMING

Bringing our ideas to life

With our feature prioritization, initial sketches, and personas set, we started bringing our ideas to life and honed in on how a user would interact with the app.

ITERATIONS

Improving the user flow of selecting a category and topic

Changing card orientation for better mobile experience

New screens to view and accept chat requests

USABILTY TESTING

After designing our high-fidelity screens and creating two prototypes, our team conducted 5 usability tests. We were happy to hear lots of positive feedback, such as our app being visually consistent with the Duolingo app, including “cool features,” having a minimalistic layout, and being simple to navigate. The only critique we implemented was minor visual changes to address button sizing and line weight.

“I love the app. It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for”
— Our favorite user

CONCLUSION

Next Steps

If we had more time to work on Duolingo Chats, we would have pursued several goals to build community and ensure the safety of users. While safety concerns did not arise in our user research, we understand the potential risk for users chatting with people they do not know. Our next steps would include:

  1. Enabling group chats (3+ users)

  2. Considering if Duolingo Chats should be for adults only, or build safety protections for children

  3. Ability to block and report users for behavior that violates the app’s safety policies

Learnings

The Duolingo Chats project was a great learning opportunity for me as a product designer and project manager. As a team, we had several discussions about the ideal user flow for the app, challenging each other’s thought processes to determine the best flow. I developed my visual design and Figma skills by following a design system and creating branded designs for our app. I also improved my prototyping skills and created a seamless prototype to conduct usability tests. I am proud of our team for professionally challenging each other to create the best user experience, collaborating on user research, and designing a beautiful app that addresses a real problem.