<aside> 💡 Reference: Yancey, K 2020, “Hi, it’s Duo”, Duolingoblog, viewed 4 January, 2023, <https://blog.duolingo.com/hi-its-duo-the-ai-behind-the-meme/>
Sung, M 2019, Why does the Duolingo owl scare me more than my high school Spanish teacher ever did?, Mashable, viewed 3 January, 2023, <https://mashable.com/article/duolingo-anxiety-notifications>
Hartman, G 2020, Building character: How a cast of characters help you learn in a language?, Duolingoblog, viewed 4 January, 2023, <https://blog.duolingo.com/building-character/>
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🔔 Unignored notification: the AI behind the meme
As a well-known application for language learning, daily practice reminder is one of the key aspects to keep the user stay focus on their process. Within 2019, Duolingo’s Machine Learning built an AI system to automatically generate hilarious reminders and send them to the users.
The purpose behind it is to make the user feel a bit guilty when they ignore or swipe away the notification on their technology. Even some notifications become a meme on social media.
🪶 The mascot: Duo the Owl - The bird that changed language learning
The most important visual aspect of their brand:
💼 The “all-business” sections are MINIMISED as much as possible
To apply the gamification aspect in educational strategy, they try to minimize anything related to business as much as possible (login process, account creation, etc.) Besides, if there is anything that they cannot make funny in the gamification aspect, they will make it simple and clean. The reason why because they want their target audience able to understand how to use their app easy and enjoyable.
🧼 Simple and clean interface
Their target audience is mostly all ages who want to learn languages. So they have to make sure that their interfaces are simple, clean, well-designed, and easy to use to keep all users on track during their process.
💬 Iconography
Throughout the design system in Duolingo, they use a lot of icons to represent something hilarious and cute such as in the notification messages.