Duolingo is a digital language learning tool that allows users to practice dozens of languages, accessible both through mobile and the web. We conducted usability tests on the Japanese and Korean “learning a new writing system” tools and provided design recommendations to improve users’ experience with learning unfamiliar writing systems.
This case study is a non-sponsored, team-based project I worked on in the Usability Study course at the University of Washington.
UX Designer, Design Researcher
Moderated Usability Study, Interface Redesign
Camille Bourbonnais, Naomi Johnson, Yimeng Wang, Ruican Zhong
Jan 2022 - Mar 2022
Figma, Miro, Zoom
Non-Latin based languages are generally quite difficult to learn for English speakers accustomed to the Latin alphabet due to its unfamiliar writing systems, grammar, etc. Duolingo also occasionally suffers from inconsistencies in volunteer resources wherein “popular” latin-based languages have better or more thoroughly workshopped features. Our team was interested in examining how their perceived “unfamiliarity” shapes the overall language learning experience on Duolingo, as well as discovering which usability positivities and shortcomings currently exist on its platform.
8 non-Latin based languages have a specific character-learning tool, shown separately from the main lesson tree on Duolingo. As we saw this tool as the essential first step for non-native speakers to familiarize themselves with the language’s respective writing system, we decided to explore how users interact with this character feature to properly explore their experiences with learning unfamiliar writing systems.
By providing design recommendations for Duolingo’s “character-learning” tool, we help English speakers better navigate new writing systems.
Japanese & Korean
Web interface
Moderated / Remote
Zoom
After collecting the data from our screener questionnaire, based on people's interests, we decided to target people who meet the following requirements. We recruited 10 participants (5 for Japanese and 5 for Korean studies) from the screener respondents.
People who want to learn either Japanese or Korean
People who are new to the respective writing systems
(Cannot read or write it)
People who are new to Duolingo, or have limited prior experience
(If the participants have used Duolingo before, they should have only used it a few times in the past year.)
We asked the participants to complete 3 main tasks thinking aloud to understand their holistic experience with the character-learning tool.
Navigating Duolingo's homepage and explaining what it communicates to them
Navigating Duolingo's characters page and explaining what it communicate to them
Completing two characters lessons while thinking aloud to measure usability and learnability
We move the data to a Miro board and created Affinity Diagrams to map out and consolidate a large amount of information. We discussed the scope and severity of each finding and determined what needs to be prioritized.
I took a lead and designed the vial examples of our proposed solutions.
Scope: Mid
Severity: High
We believe low awareness of their own mistakes could interfere with users' acquisition of new knowledge. Thus, the learnability of the design is low.
"When I get it wrong, I don't really notice what I got wrong."
Scope: Mid
Severity: Mid
It was not very clear for participants that they were matching the sounds on the left with the characters on the right column. Some also assumed they would drag the buttons instead of clicking. This happened because the design was not intuitive and lacked instructions.
"I don't know how we're supposed to match them because there are no arrows or anything so I'm not sure if we're supposed to drag or directly pair them up"
Scope: Mid
Severity: Mid
Participants had to figure out how to build a character by randomly clicking the buttons since they didn't understand how exactly Korean characters were built yet. While they were able to learn it quickly, it was not an intuitive and pleasant experience.
“There were no cues for this exercise and you just clicked on the buttons to put them in the right box, I thought you had to trace them”
Scope: low
Severity: high
Several characters were randomly selected for each lesson with no clear instructions of what they were learning. Participants felt unsure how the lessons play a part in learning the language overall.
“I wish it would have been a little more upfront on what exactly and how exactly I'm learning, I wanted to see a clear lesson plan.”
Randomly selected characters (ko, shi, su, u)
Scope: High
Severity: Low
We realized the time each spent on a lesson was not a useful usability metric in our study, as as it takes longer when the participants think aloud and the facilitator asked questions. We ended up focusing more on qualitative data.
Originally, we wanted to recruit people who were interested in learning any new language with an unfamiliar writing system, but narrowing the scope down to 2 specific languages made our project manageable and helped us identify what to focus on the most during the testing.
While the participants liked Duolingo's simple and clean interface, I found that making the design too simple could make it less intuitive. I believe designers should identify the sweet spot that enables both simplicity and intuitive design.
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