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Forming Good Learning Habits with Duolingo UX

120 days of Duolingo

Wayne Cen
Prototypr
6 min readSep 2, 2020
Photo tweeted by Duolingo — ‘Hint, it’s not dark mode’

The first time I learned about Duolingo was through a meme — the one where Duo (the owl mascot), would ‘threaten’ users with passive-aggressive notifications if they didn’t continue using the app.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, but with this year’s turn of events, I decided to learn Japanese on my spare time. It’s been four months since I started, and I’ve observed some design choices that made the learning experience more enjoyable and friendly. I wanted to talk about these design choices and share my thoughts about them.

Using Gamification as a Motivator

Keep the Streak Alive

Streaks are a gamification mechanic that keep track of a user’s daily progress towards a completed action (finishing a lesson). They’re great for habit forming as they provide positive reinforcement for an action, giving the user a sense of achievement.

Duolingo makes it easy to start streaks, as users are able to set their own daily goals; 5 minutes; 10 minutes; 15 minutes per day, and so on. Five to ten minutes per day seems relatively easy compared to taking a weekly hour-long college class — I guess the takeaway from this is to break down the task and make it easier, so that users are…

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Published in Prototypr

Prototyping, UX Design, Front-end Development and Beyond 👾 | ✍️ Write for us https://bit.ly/apply-prototypr

Written by Wayne Cen

Software Developer & Product Designer | Writing about digital experiences | Get in touch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/waynercen/

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