Jackson Shuttleworth: evaluation

Transcript context

…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? Again, sticking with this one to seven day streak, the idea of a streak, particularly probably to this audience, is obvious. Like, oh, it's a streak, it just counts how many days. We've realized over time that a lot of users do not understand how a streak works, and it can be as small as, well, I don't understand how streak freezes work, or I don't... Like my mom the other day was talking to you about it, she's like, "Oh, I didn't use Duolingo and I come back and my streak's still there." So, there's certain elements of the feature that we can do better at explaining, but even what a streak is, it's tracking how many days that I've used the app, yeah, the more that we can make the feature easily comprehensible to users, the more retentive it is. And we've run a number of experiments to do this. You asked about early easy copy changes that we made. Actually, this is my first win experiment when I joined Duolingo was, when you start a streak, we have little copy at the bottom of the screen that just, I don't know, it's like flavor copy, we use it to celebrate you, or give you context, and I ran some tests that just tried to in eight words explained what a streak was, that was it. And it was a massive win because it really dumbed down here is exactly how the streak worked, and it really helped users just understand what they needed to do. And I think this is something that's like, you constantly got to remind yourself, particularly if you work in tech and you're building cool tech features, but your user base is not a bunch of tech workers, to think about, all right, who is my audience? And for us it's not just tech workers, it's not people in America, it's people all over the world of all ages of all cultures, and so making sure that your feature is even something as simple as the streak is understandable is critical. What was the actual copy, do you remember?…

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