Streaks work best for products where daily user progress feels imperceptible
Jackson Shuttleworth · Behind the product: Duolingo streaks | Jackson Shuttleworth (Group PM, Retention Team) · Dec 15, 2024 · at 32:03
Jackson Shuttleworth, Group PM leading retention at Duolingo, discusses why streak gamification is effective for long-horizon skills like language learning.
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“The streak works really well for Duolingo because with language learning, it's really hard to see day-to-day progress and becoming more fluent, like become, and fluency is, is, is, is not even the right word. It's like becoming better at Spanish or whatever. It is a years long process for someone to get better at a language. I mean, Duolingo makes it easier, but you still got to put in thousands of hours if you're going to reach, you know, C one or C two fluency. And that is really hard to track on a day to day. And so the streak works really well for us because we not, might not be able to tell you, Hey, you now know zero point zero, you know, one percent more Spanish, but we can show you, Hey, like you've gotten your streak a little bit higher. And so I think this works particularly well when you're an app that. Is doing something that's going to be sensed or felt over a longer term to help contextualize that progress in a way that makes more sense, or at least feels more tangible to a user.”
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