Role
Project and Design Lead
Created concept and led the pitch, research, and product design. Led cross-functional collaboration to flesh out the technical spec and secure the engineers for launch. Once the News Feed shipped, collaborated with team members to create a simple dashboard for pushing and editing content without requiring weekly technical assistance. Launched a Spanish version. Tweaked the product based on A/B test results, tracked project, and managed content during second phase, writing the playbook and guidelines for content design in preparation for a transfer to its brand new team.
What we are solving
People don't know this, but we have a ton going on
Duolingo has sub-products, product and feature launches, promotions, social posts, and a community that not enough people are hearing about. We can give users a central place to find announcements and community, while providing a more cohesive voice to the Duolingo brand and bringing more visibility to its teams.
Summary
A news feed to showcase the depth of the Duolingo brand
After a study showed that as many as 75% of our mobile app users were not aware of the richness of the Duolingo community, and seeing evidence that the extent of projects and features that makes Duolingo special were not reaching enough people, we proposed creating an in-app news feed on iOS that would make user-facing updates more accessible and visible in the most Duolingo way: colorful, fun, and bite-sized. This feature was a success that boosted metrics across the board and immediately earned a coveted spot in our tab bar. It has since expanded to Android and additional UI languages.
Did users even know that we have a high quality blog, a killer TikTok account, unmissable promos, an award-winning podcast, and other products?
We wanted to grow our active user base by making the product experience stickier. Our learners were very aware that Duolingo is a great language learning tool. But there is more to love; we have feature highlights, product updates, fan art, and sub products that we wished we could communicate to users without relying on web forums, official email newsletters, or different social channels.
How can we let people know that someone created an impressive birthday cake based on our mascot, or that our CEO posted an announcement? And is there a way we can give our recruiting, blog, social media, and call-to-action numbers a boost when needed?
A wealth of information, channels, and products that could potentially be unified and presented to users via the News Feed
Idea and iteration
An old pitch brought back stronger and nimbler
In 2018, I drafted an early version of this feature prior to our major brand redesign. It was a low-risk proposal for our web platform only. Duolingo's website has a smaller but dedicated user base, meaning tests run on the web platform are generally considered lower risk, but the tradeoff is that results from super users aren't always a good indicator of how an experiment would do on mobile.
On web, we had a notification bell on the top menu bar that contained mostly "follow" notifications (person X has followed you). We saw potential in repurposing that existing feature for what I called “relevant notifications.”
This included when Duolingo made announcements, there was a new batch of Stories published, when someone answered your question in a Sentence Discussion, and when people you were following posted something in the forums.
Conducting background research and talking to companies like Supercell
Duolingo is a mobile-first company, and when I brought this project back into discussion, we decided this was a product that should be launched on our app to get accurate data and learn as much as possible, quickly.
Before launching into the mobile mocks for this feature, I conducted some background research to inform the design and mechanics for the proposal by looking into what other apps with similar update feeds do. Most helpful was a meeting with Supercell, publisher of mobile games like Clash of Clans and Brawl Stars. One of their games, Clash Royale, has a news feed similar to what we were working on, so we were interested in talking to them.
These efforts yielded a ton of time-saving information, such as what kind of news items they publish and how they select it, how they justify sending users away from the app to consume information about the app, red dot frequency, how often they publish new items, and whether the feature even brings value. Our analysis saved us time and allowed us to make informed choices on how to start and what to expect.
The great “real estate” debate: the News Feed entry point
One discussion that this feature initiated was, where would this News Feed live on the app screen? Duolingo's app "real estate" is a very competitive arena internally. We don't want the main screen to be cluttered and overwhelming, and we don't want to "hide" the feature behind several taps. We also don't want to cannibalize other features and harm other teams. Each team typically owns a metric, and being front and center has a huge effect on metrics, especially considering our hundreds of millions of users.
Our options included:
We explored and discussed these options with PMs, the Head of Product, Chief of Design, and CEO, designed solutions, and negotiated until we felt we found something that would work for everyone. After that, it was time for wires and mocks.
Here are some ideas of where the News Feed could live within the app, visualized
A more fleshed out visual showing a "Top Bell" dropdown
And here is the News Feed in its own tab, on the bottom menu
The final version earned a tab spot!
The launched design was very close to what I shared above, with the removal of the “featured” post for this first iteration, along with the addition of the date and slightly modified outlines. The News Feed earned its own tab on the bottom menu. Typically, there are entire teams behind each of these buttons, and this was presented by our little impromptu strike team, so this was a big deal for our team. It showed that leadership was supportive and believed in the initiative.
We launched the News Feed as an A/B test in Aug 2020 for iOS users learning via our English UI. Features tested front and center on the main app can show quick significant impact because of the large user base of millions of DAUs.
Results
We ran those A/B tests and man were the results exciting
The News Feed brought immediate growth for time spent in the app and for most products and posts we featured.
We measured performance against guardrail metrics and tested additional tweaks, including red notification dot frequency, switching tab positions, and news item content.
A collaboration with an amazing engineer resulted in a simple CMS and ran all the content tests and curation for a couple of months to establish guidelines and standards before it was ready to be handed off.
Since launch, the News Feed has become an important tool for promoting Duolingo matters, and has expanded to Spanish UI (second largest UI language after English), and to Android.
“The News Feed is a primary driver for some of our most impactful work, including our response to the Russia-Ukraine war. We’ve recently started using it to drive to career and talent-focused blogs and content in the hopes of increasing our applicant pool to open roles. Shared promotion codes for podcast and partnerships drive additional conversions to Duolingo Plus.”
Sam Zabell, Duolingo Head of Editorial Strategy
Many product teams have partnered with the News Feed team to create filtering options that make it possible to target experiment groups or other segments of users that are seeing a particularly impactful feature (Duolingo Super, V2), allowing us to communicate with those learners directly and help drive people to blog posts that offer deeper context to a launch or feature.
People spend more time on the app, and engage more with what we want
UPV (unique page views) to the Duolingo Blog
Unique active users on the main app
Sign ups to volunteer for our Beta Testing program. Previously the team had created a landing page advertised to a list of segmented users; we only had 500 before this, an 800% increase
Quality applications for becoming a Duolingo Event Host within 10 days, compared to an email blasted to ~400K users, which yielded 200 quality applications