Jackson Shuttleworth: preference

Transcript context

…Perfect. Okay. Talk about how this feature originally came to be. What was the original version of it? What was the original insight that led to [inaudible 00:10:05]- Yeah, so the oldest streaks or as old as Duolingo itself. When we launched Duolingo, we launched with a streak... And I say we, I was just graduating undergrad when Duolingo launched. So, this is well before my time. But we launched with a streak feature. Initially how the feature worked was you'd come to Duolingo and you'd set a goal for yourself, and it was an XP based goal. So, Duolingo, a little bit of nomenclature, we have an experience point based system that drives a lot of our features in the app. And the way you'd set it is you'd say, based on what your language learning goal was, maybe you have a 10 experience point goal versus a 50 experience point goal. And so, extending your streak would be, hey, can you hit 50 experience points? If that's what you set your goal to be. And this worked well, I think this also speaks to how Duolingo initially grew. Luis launched it with a TEDTalk, we probably had a more tech-forward user base initially, and so this whole idea of an experience points based streak system made sense. But what that also meant is that you could have a user come and use the app, do multiple lessons a day, and maybe they just set too hard of a goal for themselves, and then lose their streak. Which, you don't need to be an expert in streaks to understand that's probably not good. The nice thing with how we initially set it up though is it really did connect with what your goal was. So, if you were serious, let's track how good you are at being a serious language learner. But I'd say one of the most impactful experiments we ran was about, this was actually as I was joining, or just after I joined we had run this experiment, was to move it from a XP based streak to just do one lesson a day, and you'd extend your streak. And the risk that you can sort of imagine is, well, then users kind of care less about it because it's not connected with their goal. And we saw none of that. This was a huge driver of DAUs, just making it easier to extend your streak, but I think really importantly it's still meaningful. The unit of use, and as you're thinking about building a streak, I think it's really important to think about what the unit of use of your app is. The unit of use for Duolingo is doing a lesson. And so, if what we care about is users coming back every day and doing a lesson, because it shows that they're actually engaging with the app, then it doesn't hurt us to make our streak focus on just do one unit versus multiple. And so, that was probably the big [inaudible 00:12:25] change experiment that we ran at the time was moving from an XP-based streak to a one lesson streak. It's also simple, and I think that's one of the things to think about with streaks. It's always easy as a PM to have a million goals or objectives for what you want your feature to be and potentially build a more complex feature, and a one lesson streak, it's just easy for more users to understand. Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say. And just for folks that aren't super familiar with XP, it's basically experience points and you get them from doing things, it's like a [inaudible 00:12:53]-…

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