Anyone been on a hotstreak with Duolingo lately? I love the app but have some heated opinions on what I think it's missing.
🤔 I recently re-found Duo after a 4 year hiatus. I had been hearing people rave about it for the past year -- how well it’s helped them learn or practice a language -- so I had to see what the buzz was about. Having used this app since 2015, I hadn’t had the best experience with it. To me, it was good at reviewing vocabulary words and grammar structure, but wasn’t the best for improving conversation or listening skills.
📬 It was exceptional at getting you to use it every day, however. Those passive aggressive behavioral nudges are good at sucking you in, and that leaderboard really ignites your competitive drive! Returning to Duo, those things are still true. They’ve definitely beefed up the listening exercises, added some personalized practice that is “AI-powered,” and upped the intensity of the colorful badges too.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been on a hot streak the past few weeks. Duo gets a lot right when it comes to learning.
🚢 But there are definitely some key learning and product features (or maybe even philosophies?) that it misses the boat on.
A few ideas:
1. 👫 👫 GROUP LEARNING. While you can aggressively try to outshine strangers with your XPs, there’s no interaction on your learning path with other real people. Learning is social, and adults often learn best when they can add onto each other’s ideas and thoughts.
2. 🤖 HIGH QUALITY AI. While they boast about AI for Super users, by this point AI should be doing more than giving you practice lessons based on your mistakes. Let me learn the consequences of what my mistakes mean in context. Let me converse in a life-like conversation with a robot that is trained to help me through the mistakes.
3. 🤓 TRUE PERSONALIZATION. Give me lessons that align with THE WHY of why I’m on the app in the first place. If I’m on Duolingo because I want to better communicate with family members, don’t focus 5 units on ordering from a restaurant. A one-size fits all approach to the learning path is a thing of the past. I know how to order a croissant, but conversing with my son’s French side of the family is wayyy more important.
(For fun: an interesting article here that shows how the most committed Duolingo members are usually those learning the language for family purposes…)
#ai #learning #edtech #product #productdevelopment
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