Lessons from a Cellist (or, what product people can learn from user research)
summary
Duolingo Stories is losing daily users by mid‑2018 so the team spends a quarter doing open‑ended interviews (including churned users interviews) across four language courses, then validates findings with usability tests instead of only A/Bs. A cellist’s metaphor reframes Stories as sight‑reading vs scales, prompting a content rebuild toward A1/A2 stories, an onboarding tweak that yields a 7% D1 retention improvement, and a listening‑only experiment that fails because content was too hard. Metrics rebound by Sept 2019.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (11)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:20What are Duolingo Stories
- 5:55User research
- 9:10User interviews
- 13:07Lessons from a cellist
- 15:36How does this fit into your journey
- 17:42What we did
- 20:00Aha moment
- 23:04A big overhaul
- 23:26Where we are today
- 23:57Takeaways
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