Duolingo

Survey

To start researching, I created a survey to gather information on the problem. Thirty-one participants completed the survey, providing me with plenty of data to move into the next phase of brainstorming a solution.

User Interviews

Next in the research phase of the project, I conducted user interviews to inform the design. I created an interview script with 7 questions and interviewed 3 users remotely. The purpose of the interviews was to understand why and how the participants use Duolingo as well as to understand their pain points more in-depth. Ultimately, I used this information to create a persona that helped to guide my design decisions throughout the project.

Personas

I created 1 persona for this project based on the data gathered during the user interviews. I referred back to this persona during the design process to ensure that I was designing the feature to be useful for the target user.

User Flow

I created a user flow with all of the paths a user can take while using the Duolingo app so that I could understand the user's journey and needs.

Task Flow

Lastly, before starting the design process, I created a task flow to visualize what pages I needed to create and how they would connect.

Sketches

I began the design process with low-fidelity sketches to brainstorm several different design solutions before committing to one. My sketches were based on the survey and user interviews. To the right, I have included initial sketches to brainstorm the button placement on the homepage which would open up the added feature page.

Mid-fidelity Wireframes

After sketching out my ideas. I created mid-fidelity wireframes to confirm the layout of my designs before moving on to high-fidelity wireframes.

High-fidelity Wireframes

Using Figma, I translated my mid-fidelity wireframes into high-fidelity wireframes. Taking my mentor's suggestions into consideration, I iterated on these wireframes twice before moving on to user testing.

Usability Testing

I created a fully-functional, high-fidelity prototype on Figma. I recruited 3 participants to test the prototype. The participants made observations, gave suggestions, and asked questions while clicking through the prototype. Afterward, I created an affinity map to group the data in a way that would help me to understand the users' needs and pain points.

Affinity Map

After the usability testing, I gathered all of the feedback from the users and created an affinity map using post-it notes. This helped me to organize the feedback into the following categories: successes, pain points, suggestions, and questions.

User Feedback Changes

• A change that I made from user feedback was to include a way to view more options on the Learning Goal page. I chose to use an ellipsis as the icon that would open up a pull-up menu.

• I added a new page which is a pull-up menu where users would be able to select more options to customize their learning goal as well as the option to delete the goal.

• On the learning goal homepage, I added a small timeline with a percentage to show the user how much progress they have made on their learning goal.

Future Revisions

If I were to have more time to work on this project, I would create an in-depth timeline page, as well as continue with the idea of adding more than one goal at once with the option to switch between goals. I would also want to do more user testing with a larger population.

Learnings

I enjoyed adding a feature to a product that already exists because I felt like I could focus on producing quality work and I could give my attention to small details more than I can with larger projects in the same amount of time. The challenge was that I had less flexibility when working on one feature, but I'm okay with that because I like being one of many contributors to a project.