- Duolingo Streak Goals
- Duolingo tested a simple streak goal feature, initially telling users they were 7x more likely to finish a course with a 30-day streak.
This simple message, focused on outcomes, was a huge win, demonstrating the power of goal setting and clear communication.
Jackson Shuttleworth
One of the fun ones that we did, and it’s honestly as much about process as it is about the feature itself was we have a feature called streak goal. And it is, again, so much of the stuff seems so obvious in retrospect, but, you know, it was really novel at the time. You know, we had this idea of like, hey, maybe we’ll just goal users to hitting a certain streak length. As you can imagine, this is pretty powerful, you know, user psychology. And we started with the simplest version of this. And this is how Duolingo does a lot of our testing. You know, rather than design the big complex feature for V1, just do like the simplest encapsulation of what that feature can be, see if it has legs, and then just add to it iteratively Over time. This is partially how we get to 600 plus experiments on streaks. They’re not all big ones. But we started, and it was funny, we actually took a learning from our monetization team. So one of the strings that they had, the pieces of copy that they had worked really, really well was, I think it was you’re like 5.6 times more likely to finish the course if you subscribe To plus sort of, you know, now it’s super our subscription. And it was, it was a really good hook that if you, if you really cared, you’d sign up. Um, and so we ran a similar, we, we had a similar thought where it’s like, Oh, let’s just tell you how much more likely you are to finish the course if you get a 30 day streak. And so we started with that. And I think it was like, you’re seven times more likely to finish the course if you have a 30-day streak. And just that message when you started your streak, us telling you that was awesome. Huge win. Indicating an outcome. And Duolingo doesn’t have, we have a gem economy, but we don’t actually have, it’s all you learning. But being able to actually talk about it in terms of the outcomes that a user would think about in this case, trying to finish the course was a huge win. So this is where we started and we’re like, ah, goal setting. All right. We, we should go much harder on that. And now let’s just beat the heck out of it.
