DuoVillage

Explore Your Village

Learn language naturally within real world scenarios like shopping, meeting new people, and exploring your personalized village tailored to your learning style.

Set Your Plans

With addition to goal setting, you can also plan for a trip. Specify where you want to go, what types of activities you'd like to do, and what level you'd like to be at before your trip.

Set Your Plans

With addition to goal setting, you can also plan for a trip. Specify where you want to go, what types of activities you'd like to do, and what level you'd like to be at before your trip.

A World Of Languages

Explore unique villages for every language, with specific experiences based on location and culture. Meet personable and unique chat bots that remember you and always have something interesting to say.

Available On Every Screen

Pick up where you left off on any device. Duovillage is an experience that goes where you go, so you can always explore and learn wherever you are.

Available On Every Screen

Pick up where you left off on any device. Duovillage is an experience that goes where you go, so you can always explore and learn wherever you are.

A New Way To Learn Language

Duolingo's mission is to make education free, fun, and accessible to all. Many people who use Duolingo find their in person events useful because it allows for real world practice unlike other methods of learning. When COVID struck the world it changed the lives of many, including those who were avid users of Duolingo. My groupmates and I found that Duolingo's current tools could not adapt to today's environment.

The Problem

Our Initial Idea…

  • Move in-person events online through video conferences
  • Bi-directional online pairing program where people can teach and learn from each other

What we found…

We found that in-person events were not commonly used.  Here are some examples of posts from the Duolingo forum showing that users are anxious about attending events. Users worry that they wouldn’t be able to follow a conversation or chicken out because they don’t feel comfortable with the conversational skills

Surveys and Interviews

We also conducted user surveys and one-on-one interviews and found that most users (84%) prefer to study a new language alone rather than in a social or group setting.


Survey Results

We sent out a survey to 63 participants who have used or still use Duolingo and we found that although it does it confirm our research behind solo learning, people were still interested in community style gaming as long as the methods of communication were chat based with only 12 percent of users interested in voice/video communication.


Voicing Opinions

We found that our initial idea wasn’t addressing core user needs nor providing value to the business. However, we did find that users had unmet needs with the current Duolingo app and website. These boxes included user feedback from our survey.


What Duolingo Found...

  • Duolingo had already done A/B testing of the pairing program and it was not successful even though users had asked for this features. Duolingo’s co-founder said “The amount of activation energy need to overcome social anxiety was too high.” to make this feature successful.
  • Duolingo had turned to research from the US Military, which found that the fear of looking stupid is associated with a poor ability to learn a new language.  
"The amount of activation energy needed to overcome social anxiety was too high."
‍- Quote from Luis von Ahn, co-founder of Duolingo

Our Research Identified 2 Problems with Duolingo

Problem 1

Most Users prefer to study alone but want a new way to learn and practice with real-world context.

Problem 2

Losing interests in continuing with the lessons and practices due to lack of motivation.


Problem 1

Duolingo is for solo learners, but it has very limited spoken exercises because it focuses on more listening and writing practices. If you take a look at the screenshot on your right hand, it’s says “type what you hear.” this is Duolingo’s exercise and you cannot  find speaking practice for verbal communication. Due to this limitation, Duolingo does not provide you with practice common phrases like “I would like order a cup of coffee” and “Where is the train station?”.  

Also, Duolingo has limited interaction for practicing a new language as it does not have an AI chatbots that can have human like conversation and interacts with you through your voice or texts.


Problem 2

Let’s look into the second problem. Why are users losing interests and motivations in continuing with the lessons and practices?
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This is Because Duolingo has limited personalized options for goals and avatar.

Current Duolingo allows users to set a goal based on the experience points or XP. However,  it is not personalized enough for many users because each user has a different goal or purpose to learn a new language. For Avatar customization, Duolingo app provides only 3 clothes to purchase and duolingo’s game like feature is not fully utilized either.

Persona


Meet Our User Élise Couture

Élise is a French graduate student living in Paris. She is motivated to learn English because she is moving to the USA next year. One of her goals is to visit Japan.
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About her:
  • Prefers learning a language alone because she is shy
  • Feels uncomfortable with speaking in front of others
  • Enjoys playing online games
  • Feels accomplished when seeing her learning progression and earning rewards
  • Uses free apps only  


Competitive Analysis

We found that Duolingo had two main competitors, Rosetta Stone and Babbel Both competitive services are paid services and have a subscription model, which is why the user base is far below the amount that Duolingo has since Duolingo is free to use. For example, Rosetta stone costs 89$ for 3 months and it is not affordable for the user like Elise.


Competitive Analysis

The User Wants:
  • Real-world practice to the current lessons in a way that doesn’t increase social anxiety.  
  • Personalized options to stay  motivated on lessons and practices
The Business Needs:
  • Engagement rate increase and retention of current users
  • Revenue increase by enhancing the rewards and goal features.  


Ideation sketches v1

We started with sketching out our initial idea. Since we were thinking of groups within Duolingo, we were thinking of ways we could create lobbies and ways that we could add friends. But after we finished our research we went back to the drawing board.


Ideation Sketches v2

We then started sketching with our priority being solo learning and retention. We were coming up with game ideas, new ways we could present the current website and mobile app until eventually we came to our solution.

Our Solution

Our solution is Duovillage, a revamped learning experience where users can learn through language lessons and practice their skills with other characters using an AI chatbot

Web App Redesign

The previous level bubbles are now attached to a location and building. Now giving more context to what you are learning.
Users can now set goals and timelines for learning new languages.
The new home screen now shows the Duovillage front and center.
Finding friends is much easier now, users can search for friends and request to add them rather than follow and wait for a follow back. Users can also see how far in the village their friends have gone.
Users can now set goals and timelines for learning new languages.
Users can go through the different buildings/locations and see who they will meet and interact with.
Lessons won’t change and users can still look at their progress but now can apply their learnings to real life scenarios and continuously go back to practice with new experiences each time.
Users can view all their personal goals and create new ones. This gives users the opportunity to receive notifications that are personal and based on a timeline.
Setting new goals is easy, users can set their new language, the skill level, and why they want to learn it. For example if someone is traveling to Japan they can set a goal to learn some Japanese before they get there.

Mobile App Redesign

The previous level bubbles are now attached to a location and building. Now giving more context to what you are learning.
Lessons won’t change and users can still look at their progress but now can apply their learnings to real life scenarios and continuously go back to practice with new experiences each time.
In every mission user meet with a character that is powered by a chat bot. They can tap the translate button to directly translate what they say back into their native language.
Users are given a set of answers to choose from to continue the conversation.
Users can select any word in the answers to translate its meaning.
Users can tap the audio button to play a recoding of the response to hear it in the language they are learning.
Users can tap the microphone to say the response back for more XP.
Users can continue to another mission or go back to their lessons.
The new goals tab replaces the leaderboard tab.
Users can set goals and view all their current goal.
Users can select the level they would like to achieve by a certain time.
During this project we had already moved to an online course mode due to Covid-19. Our groups have been pre selected and I was placed with Hanna Hasegawa, Rehan Rameez, and Christina Lukasko.
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