Evidence receipt / preference
Published · transcript-backedJackson Shuttleworth: preference
15 Dec 2024 Lenny's Podcast Behind the product: Duolingo streaks | Jackson Shuttleworth (Group PM, Retention Team)
“That is definitely a benefit, if I had an app... And that this is actually why I think a lot of mobile games do streaks differently, because to say that you played a mobile game, and as somebody who plays a lot of mobile games, that you've done it for 3000 days in a row, I don't know, maybe that hits a little bit different than you've learned Spanish for 3000 days in a row.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Jackson Shuttleworth
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- preference
- Recorded
- 15 Dec 2024
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…One other tidbit I just want to mention, an advantage you all have that other companies don't have is people want to learn a language, and so getting pushed to come back to an app for something that they want to do, it's not an advantage a lot of products have. So, anything you want to add there, of just like this is why Duolingo might be a little different from what you're working on. That is definitely a benefit, if I had an app... And that this is actually why I think a lot of mobile games do streaks differently, because to say that you played a mobile game, and as somebody who plays a lot of mobile games, that you've done it for 3000 days in a row, I don't know, maybe that hits a little bit different than you've learned Spanish for 3000 days in a row. I think the comparison set is much larger though, than a lot of companies give themselves credit for, and I think that there's... There's a lot of ways that companies think about their... There are very few companies I imagine out there in the world saying, oh, we don't do some degree of good for our users... Even if it's like a game, it's like, I don't know, you're giving somebody a moment away from the craziness of their lives. And so, I do think though that is contingent on companies who are going to figure out if a streak works for them, to figure out how can you frame the streak in such a way that a user does feel good about it. And it's easier for a Duolingo, but I think there's creative ways to phrase this for users. The other thing maybe just on that that I'll say is, the streak works really well for Duolingo because with language learning it's really hard to see day-to-day progress in becoming more fluent. And fluency is not even the right word, it's like becoming better at Spanish or whatever, it is a years long process for someone to get better at a language. Duolingo makes it easier, but you still got to put in thousands of hours if you're going to reach C1 or C2 fluency, and that is really hard to track on a day-to-day, and so the streak works really well for us because we might not be able to tell you, hey, you now know 0.01% more Spanish, but we can show you, hey, you've gotten your streak a little bit higher. And so, I think this works particularly well when you're an app that is doing something that's going to be sensed or felt over a longer term to help contextualize that progress in a way that makes more sense, or at least feels more tangible to a user. Great, that was a great context. Empowering to a lot of companies that aren't necessarily doing language learning. Okay. So, it took us on a long tangent away from lessons and experiments you ran along the journey of iterating on the streak. So, a few things you've shared so far is just, it started with this XP idea, and then went to a lesson, then you iterated on ways to make it simpler, maybe harder, you added streak goals, where you commit to I'm going to hit a certain goal of streak. What else? What else have you found that has worked, didn't work, lessons learned?…
Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.