Duolingo
|
2024
In the summer of 2024, I interned at Duolingo as a Product Design Intern on the New Writing Systems team. My main project focused on improving the Chinese and Japanese courses by enhancing character recognition and reducing redundancy in Character Write exercises. As a side project, I redesigned and rewrote UX copy for core bottom sheets to align with Duolingo’s voice and localization guidelines.
ROLE
Product Designer
(was the sole designer for this project)
TEAM
1 Technical Product Manager
1 Associate Product Manager
1 Staff Software Engineer
4 Software Engineers
TIMELINE
May - August 2024
TOOL
Figma
PROJECT CONTEXT
What are character write exercises?
In Duolingo’s Japanese and Chinese courses, Character Write exercises help learners build visual familiarity with individual characters and their components — a crucial foundation before learners encounter those characters in more complex contexts.
How it works
Learners progress through a series of writing tasks with gradually decreasing guidance. Early exercises offer stroke order hints and directional arrows, while later ones require learners to recall and write characters from memory. This scaffolded approach supports retention and reinforces recognition step by step.
PROBLEM
Repetition of these exercises are reducing learner engagement
While this progression is effective for learning, we noticed that the rigid, formulaic structure often felt repetitive — especially when learners practiced similar characters in a row. On the web, tracing with a mouse or trackpad added extra friction, making the experience feel even more tedious.
As a result, many learners were losing interest or skipping the exercises altogether. Thus, we asked ourselves:
How might we improve learner’s character familiarity and decrease repetition in the Character Write exercises?
SOLUTION
The Radical Puzzle Exercise
To address this challenge, we designed Radical Puzzle, an additional exercise to break up Character Write sessions and keep learners engaged.
Instead of repeatedly tracing full characters, it focuses on radicals — the meaningful components of Japanese and Chinese characters. By identifying and assembling these building blocks, learners strengthen their understanding of character structure in a more dynamic and less repetitive way.
↓ Scroll for the process!
AUDIT
Teaching Japanese and Chinese in other language platforms
As a first step toward improving the experience, I conducted a competitive audit of eight language learning platforms to evaluate their approaches to teaching Japanese and Chinese.
This analysis helped us identify effective strategies, common pitfalls, and opportunities to differentiate our solution. From this analysis, three common patterns stood out:
🏞️ Character-Picture MatchMany competitors were pairing characters with images to show their pictographic roots | ⺓ Lessons on RadicalsThey also were teaching Japanese and Chinese character building blocks to help decode new characters | 📝 Writing Within ContextMany also had exercises where users were task to write characters within real words and sentences |
BRAINSTORM
Collaborative ideating to improve learning methods
With insights from the audit, we moved into the brainstorming phase to start shaping solutions. Collaboration was key to this process. I worked closely with designers, curriculum experts, and product managers on the New Writing Systems team. Through workshops and sketching sessions, we built on each other’s ideas and narrowed them down to a few clear directions worth exploring further.
Narrowing down the solution
After the brainstorming phase, we gathered everything we’d explored and focused on the ideas that best addressed the challenges uncovered during our research. Feedback from learners and insights from the competitive audit pointed to three key needs: more variety, stronger structural understanding, and meaningful context.
With those goals in mind, our team narrowed the concepts down to three solutions designed to make Japanese and Chinese character practice more effective and engaging:
1. Multiple Character Write
Expands beyond single-character tracing by asking learners to write multiple Japanese or Chinese character within the context of a word to reinforce how characters function together.
2. Radical Puzzle
Builds deeper recognition skills by having learners identify and assemble radicals, the essential building blocks of characters, into complete forms.
3. Missing Stroke Puzzle
Strengthens visual memory by presenting partially completed characters and challenging learners to choose the correct missing stroke.
USABILITY TESTING
Using user testing to evaluate learner's experiences
After designing and prototyping the new character exercises, we ran usability tests to see how learners engaged with our new character exercises and to validate whether they were intuitive, useful, and effective.
Method
We conducted remote sessions with six Japanese → English learners via Zoom. Participants were active daily users and were asked to:
Share their current experience learning Japanese.
Think aloud as they completed several new exercise prototypes.
Complete a short pre- and post-assessment to gauge short-term recognition gains.
Key findings from the usability tests
“I didn’t even need the instructions — I just knew what to do. It felt really straightforward and easy to follow.” - Participant, 27, Daily Duolingo Learner
✨ Ease of UseExercises felt intuitive, and learners quickly understood how to complete them. | 💡 Context MattersMulti-character exercises addressed a key gap and felt more realistic. | 📚 Deeper ConnectionsLearners wanted stronger links between characters and their meanings. |
The usability tests confirmed that our exercises were intuitive and engaging while revealing opportunities to reinforce meaning, introduce radicals more explicitly, and support more complex interactions in future iterations.
FEEDBACK
Collaborating across teams to shape better solutions
Feedback from the team also played a huge role in shaping this project. Throughout brainstorming, prototyping, and multiple rounds of iteration, I regularly shared my work with the Learning Area Design Team and the New Writing Systems Team. Their perspectives helped me refine ideas, spot gaps I hadn’t considered, and make sure the solutions we were designing truly supported learners.
Design critique with the Learning Area Design Team
I shared the prototypes with the Learning Area Design Team, whose feedback helped refine the visual language and interaction details. They encouraged introduction of world characters, clearer use of color, and improved overall clarity — changes that made the final designs feel more polished and cohesive.
Feedback sessions with the New Writing System Team
I also shared the designs with the New Writing Systems Team, whose feedback was pivotal in shaping the direction of the project. They were genuinely excited about all three ideas. However, as we discussed next steps, it became clear that we would need to focus on just one concept to move forward with, primarily for technical feasibility reasons.
In the end, we chose to prioritize the Radical Puzzle — not only because it resonated the most with the team and was the most viable option from an engineering standpoint, but also because it directly addressed our core problem statement of reducing repetition while strengthening character familiarity.
FINAL SOLUTION
Try the final design: Radical Puzzle
The exercise begins by showing the meaning of the target character. At the bottom, learners see the radical and must choose the correct missing component to complete the character, with additional options acting as distractors.
For example, if the target character means “sea,” the learner sees the water radical (氵) in the middle and has to select the correct part to form 海.
👉 Try the practice yourself here ↗ to see how the Radical Puzzle works in action.
TAKEAWAYS
Lessons I learned along the way
Being a Product Design intern at Duolingo was an incredibly rewarding experience. It strengthened my design skills, challenged me with complex problems, and taught me how to create impactful experiences for a global audience.
Two key lessons stood out from this project
🏈 Design is a team sport. Working closely with PMs, engineers, curriculum experts, and other designers showed me how much stronger ideas become when shaped by different perspectives.
🌱 Finding clarity in the unknown. We often didn’t have all the answers upfront, but learning to break down ambiguity into actionable design decisions helped me move the project forward with confidence.
