The Art Of Developing Engagement
You only need small actions to increase user engagement
I'm currently learning Spanish via Duolingo and to give you an idea of the power of their engagement tactics:
I'm on day 437 of my learning streak
I've achieved 88k XP
I've completed over 50 quests with my friends
I'm not going to dive into all the details of how they achieve some of this, but I wanted to pick out some of the simple activities that they have introduced to drive to you use the app more and more.
Streaks
I've written about the power of streaks before and they are immensely powerful.
They work on the premise that once you have reached a certain level of achievement you don't want to lose that and start again from scratch.
You've invested in order to get to this point and don't want to waste that investment. Simple.
Duolingo have however realised that streaks are important but doing something every day is hard, especially when it comes to what is on the whole a non-essential activity (learning a second language) so they have built in some "streak cheats" into the process.
They allow you to purchase (with cash or game gems) "Streak Freezes" which can be used if you don't manage to get your 5 minutes of vocab done in time.Â
It's not a complete free-for-all and you are limited to how many you can use within a period in order to preserve your streak, but it helps when you've got your streak up (say to 437 days) and you're on holiday with the family and not really focused on practising the formation of the verb "to buy".
Social commitment
This one wouldn't normally catch me out as I'm much happier doing things like this solo. It's a chance for me to do something for myself without feeling like I'm responsible for someone else.
However, I've got a friend who moved from the UK to Mexico with his family and he's been learning Spanish via Duolingo (his streak is over 1,000 days, but he is more motivated than me to figure out how to speak Spanish!).
He popped up as someone I knew (I can't remember how) so we connected and now every week or two a "Friend Quest" appears. This is where you get to set a goal between the two of you, whether it be completing a certain number of lessons, receiving a certain level of XP, or achieving a certain success rate in your lessons.
Now I'm committed to not letting him down so feel the need to open the app and do the lessons that mean we can keep our Friend Quest Streak going (we're at 54).
Damn those Duolingo people making me accountable to someone else!
Incremental engagement
The final thing I'm going to mention is the "Daily Quests", which get given and on completion of each quest you receive rewards.
On the day shown here, my three quests were:
Earn 20XP (which can be done by completing one or two lessons)
Complete 3 lessons (which is just finishing the lessons)
Score 90% or higher in 4 lessons (which is finishing the lessons but with minimal mistakes)
As you can see from these daily quests, the first one is easy, the second one requires a bit more engagement but not too much, and the third extends this out just a little further. Incremental engagement is designed to make you spend an extra minute, two minutes, or three minutes on the app and move towards a better new language understanding.
Simple, but effective at nudging you towards greater levels of engagement.
Well done Duolingo.
The question is how you can also take some of these simple steps to improve engagement with your own product. As you can see, they don't need to be complicated to work.
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