UX of digital interfaces

Week 1 of 2

Term 1 week 3

Team

Digital environments often borrow features from physical ones to help people interact with computers. This project requires you to derive something physical from the digital. Your design must be experienceable physically and sensorially.

Research methods:
Love letter/break-up letter, artefact analysis

Aishwarya Saji
Amita Tulpule
Diya Naik
Drishti Takrani
Lindy Qin
Niki Marathia
Veronika Rovniahina

The app

We all made a list of apps we would like to explore in this brief and took a vote. Duolingo got the most votes, with every team member having used it to some degree. Personally, I used the platform ten years ago to learn Swedish. When I downloaded it, I discovered that my account still existed and that my progress was saved. After all these years, I could pick up where I left.

Figure 1. Brainstorming on areas we would like to explore.

Love letter Break-up letter

We all wrote a love letter and a break-up letter, and read it out loud to each other. This helped me remember everything I liked and disliked about the app. Things sounded more or less the same, only more intense. After doing our own letters, we invited our classmates who had used Duolingo to write theirs too. Vana, Vibhooti and Clara kindly volunteered to do this.

Lover letter
I
I love that you make me feel like every language is within reach. You somehow convince me I can learn French, Spanish, maybe even Chinese, despite my track record suggesting otherwise. You’ve made language learning feel casual, like something I can slip into my day instead of a chore buried in grammar and vocabulary. Thanks for making me believe I can get past bonjour,

Love,
Niki

II
When I met you first we would spend so much time together. I always wanted to be in your good books, top of my game, not losing my streak. I enjoyed the journey you laid out for me and unlocked new information as I progressed. It gave me a sense of achievement. I became obsessed with being your star pupil and coming in the top 3. You kept me entertained with your whimsical personalities and added a lot of fun humour to the learning progress. I do admit I kind of miss interacting with you.

Your old friend,
Vana

III
I like how it’s so easy to pick a language and learn things. You’re also super cute and I like your widgets and animations. I love how there’s a variety of exercises from writing, speaking, and listening (for a fee). I hope we can continue this relationship.

Love,
Vibhooti

IV
You’ve opened up my eyes to the possibilities and many different worlds. I treasure our relationship because I value the variety of multiculturalism that you deliver. You taught me how to speak High Valyrian from Game of Thrones and I don’t think anything or anyone else would have taught me that. Spending X amount on you was worthwhile for a bit because you levelled up. You became beneficial to me, motivated me, and made my skills grow. You’re simple. Fun. Multifaceted. You even begin to call me more now. But you’re getting expensive...

Love anyway,
Clara

Break-up letter
I
Your owl is so irritating. For a symbol of wisdom, it looks incredibly dumb. You look like what being yelled at by a neon sign would sound like. I no longer believe you actually help people learn. That was propaganda I fell for ten years ago. And speaking of ten years ago, why do you still remember I once tried Swedish? Honestly, let it go. It’s not me.

It’s you,
Niki

II
Well, you might have found out by now that you’re no longer on my phone. We grew apart over the past few years. What I initially appreciated as novelty, slowly wore off. I started finding the competition tiresome and frankly annoying. I saw you for what you were, an elaborate game, rather than something that actually taught me language. I also find your notifications weird now, borderline aggressive or like a total pick-me. “I won’t bother you any more” what kind of app says that? With a heavy heart, I must say goodbye.  

Goodbye,
Vana

III
I think you suck on an overall level. I only use you for French and Spanish so I have prior knowledge of these and you don’t really help me learn new things. There’s so many competitive exercises with no structured grammar knowledge and I would rather skip the games. I hate how the leader board is. Learning a language shouldn’t be a competition. And you’re too hardcore with the streaks.
How annoying.

Yours,
Vibhooti

IV
I’ve spent quite a lot of money on you, and you’ve only served me and did the bare minimum for our relationship. You did truly teach me all the basics of communication - now even in another language. But I’d rather spend my money on things that matter to me now. You’ve taught me to grow in communication, styles, and skills, even offering me the benefits of gamification & fun during our time together. But I think it’s time we part and move onto better things, because I can’t commit to seeing you every day. It’s just too much.

Love,
Clara

The letters helped us create a pool of information for what works well and what some users can’t stand. We collated keywords from these insights to start looking for patterns that may emerge.

Love letter

Break-up letter

Rewards

Intuitive

Social

Achieved

Network

Encouraging

Accountable

Fun

Simple

Cute

Structured

Motivating

Expensive

Repetitive

Competitive

Exhausting

Hardcore

Aggressive

Nagging

Boring

Superficial

Childish

Don’t learn

Guilt-tripping

Our keywords contained a lot of emotional language, like “exhausting”, “hardcore”, “nagging”, “achieved”, “motivating”. This made us want to have a chat with someone who was familiar with the app, to see what kind of emotions come up for them as they talk about it. Shivangee agreed to talk to us about her experience on the platform. Through her body language, we could tell that she found Duolingo annoying. Using her arms, she explained why she gave it up, and what she hoped was done differently. Her feedback was:

-No application for the learning
-Feels like an assignment
-Needs a motive to keep using the app
-The app becomes needy
-Treats you like a child
-Makes you feel guilty for not showing up everyday
-Would find it more useful if there were tutors

Figure 2a. A chat about Duolingo with Shivangee.

Figure 2b. Stills from a video taken by Aishwarya Saji.

Artefact analysis

This feedback was in line with what we learned through the break-up letters. The people we spoke to seem to leave the app because they don’t feel they genuinely learn, it gets repetitive, and the notifications try too hard to grab their attention. Having heard people’s pain points, it was time to dig deeper into the qualities that make up Duolingo, and why they may be what they are.

Material qualities

Duolingo is most known for its language lessons, though it has expanded its offering to chess, music, and maths. Beyond lessons, it is a fairly social app, as users have the option to add their friends and receive updates on their progress. Consent is not asked before the app places you on a global league, nor before it pairs you with other users to complete quests. It seems even if you opt to not add your friends, the social aspects of the app are unavoidable. In between lessons, there are ads for both trying the Duolingo paid subscription, and other apps. They are so frequent that you cannot forget the paid options are there, waiting for you.

The app offers so many features that it can keep a new user engaged for a good while, figuring out what everything is. The lessons themselves are fast-paced and measure your mistakes and completion time. This can make you feel like you need to compete with yourself. Before you are able to beat your friends or strangers on the league, you have your own self to beat.
Doing lessons is a stimulating experience. In all language, chess, music, and maths, there is an audio companion, sound effects, micro-animations, and device vibrations. They stimulate all senses they are able to, and it feels if they had any control over smell, they would add an accompanying feature for it too. There are ads in between all lessons on the free plan and some of them require you to engage with them before they go away. All these factors made me feel fatigued rather quickly, as I usually avoid add-ons and paid subscriptions even on platforms I enjoy.

Of all that Duolingo offers, I felt that their chess lessons were the most effective. Perhaps because chess is a game, the gamified format feels more fitting than it does for language, music, or maths. Even if I wanted to continue learning chess on the platform though, I’d have to compromise with watching ads at the end of each lesson. If I wanted to have a smoother user experience, I would have to pay for one of their premium plans.

Figure 3. Some of Duolingo’s material qualities.

Aesthetic qualities

Although there is a lot of content on Duolingo, its interface is designed so that it is not visually overwhelming. The user’s eye is skillfully guided with the use of colour, negative space, clear call-to-actions, and micro-animations. The colour palette is saturated, matching its playful user interface. The app can look a little juvenile with its cartoonish characters, but our research showed that some adults find the art direction appealing and “cute.”

Typography feels intentional across the platform. As a language company, Duolingo’s brand is closely tied to the typefaces it uses (Duolingo, 2025). Feather Bold, their bespoke typeface, nods to their owl mascot with feather-like curls on certain letters. It’s a nice detail that connects the logo to the owl and creates a cohesive identity. Feather Bold pairs well with their secondary typeface, DIN Next Rounded, which helps establish a clear hierarchy across the app’s messaging.

Call-to-actions have a slight 3D effect that helps them stand out from surrounding content. The rounded corners, consistent across all interface shapes, enhance the gamified look but also make it feel a bit childish. Still, the clear hierarchy and distinct buttons make the layout easy to navigate and reduce visual clutter.

Motion is smooth, both within lessons and in the micro-animations scattered across the app. It makes the experience feel more immersive and gives a satisfying sense of reward when completing a lesson. Like colour and typography, its use feels deliberate. Using the app, I get the sense of how purposeful every single design choice is. This makes me wonder whether its success lies in its educational value or its engineered user experience.

Figure 4. Some of Duolingo’s aesthetic qualities.

Interactive qualities

With at least 100 million monthly active users, Duolingo has become the highest-grossing app in Education on both Google Play and Apple Store (Duolingo, 2024). One of the company’s goals is to make lessons so enjoyable that people choose them over playing a game (Duolingo, n.d.).

That is true for Karolina Kozmana, a user who competed for the top spot in the Diamond League. The Diamond league is the tier reserved for the app’s most active users, or “the 1%,” as she puts it (Kozmana, 2022). Duolingo relies on rewards, levels, and achievement-based rankings to fuel a sense of competition (Shortt et al., 2021). Kozmana won the Diamond League at the cost of her holiday. As the stakes got higher, she became fixated on winning. She recalls tasks becoming less about grasping Spanish and more about surpassing her opponents (Kozmana, 2022).

Her experience shows how Duolingo’s systems promote compulsive use. Progress indicators, animations, and sound effects urge users to keep going, and signal success regardless of how well information has been absorbed. These satisfying micro-rewards trap users in a loop that prioritises rapid tapping rather than learning at a slower pace. As smartphones grow more powerful and able to support immersive experiences, it becomes increasingly important to understand the impact they can have on the way we absorb information (Shortt et al., 2021).

In an interview with the BBC, Duolingo’s CEO and co-founder Luis von Ahn attributed the app’s success to being “good, free, and fun” (Guerrero, 2024). Competitors like Babbel also use gamification but one of the reasons Duolingo stands out seems to be its “freemium” model. That is, their ad-supported free access with optional paid upgrades formula.

Every interaction on Duolingo is designed to keep users hooked (Shortt et al., 2021). When a platform blurs the line between education and engagement, users need to be trained to ask critical questions about the kind of learning it is mediating.

Figure 5. A tour through Duolingo’s user interface.

Ideas

Following our research, we felt that bringing digital aspects of the app into the physical space could involve a game. We considered a game of Jenga, to show how fragile maintaining daily streaks can feel. We also thought hopscotch is a good representation of their menu page, where progress is visualised in the style of advancing levels.

Figure 6. Incognito Mural by Charlotte Ratel (2019). Source: Behance. Available at: behance.net/gallery/83803801/Incognito-Mural (Accessed: 24 December 2025).

Figure 7. Lenkey János Primary School Yard by Aliz Borsa (2023). Source: Behance. Available at: behance.net/gallery/176300827/Lenkey-Janos-Primary-School-Yard (Accessed: 24 December 2025).

The keywords “motivating”, “structured” and “fun” from our love letters made us want to create an experience where value could be gained through interacting with it. That’s how we came up with the idea of using Morse code as a way of making language learning a physical experience.

Figure 8. Morse Code Sheet 01, Radio Society of Great Britain (2012). Source: RSGB. Available at: rsgb.org/main/files/2012/10/Morse_Code_Sheet_01.pdf (Accessed: 24 December 2025).

We looked into the history of Morse code and its use in telegraphs and the military (Betts, 2022), and saw potential for incorporating it into a hopscotch game. To understand how it works, we learned that Morse code uses arrangements of dots and dashes to represent letters and numbers (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2025) and studied diagrams such as the example shown in Figure 8.

Figure 9. Video taken by Veronika Rovniahina.

Finally, we considered using Arduino to make our experience responsive. Although we booked a pressure sensor and had fun playing with it, after a 1:1 with Joanne from the Creative Technology Hub we decided it wasn’t within scope. Regardless, we’re excited to use it in the future!

Sources

Betts, J. (2022) Standard Morse code abbreviations [Online]. Available at: https://yourdictionary.com/articles/morse-code-abbreviations (Accessed: 24 December 2025).

Borsa, A. (2023) Lenkey János Primary School Yard [Online image]. Available at: https://www.behance.net/gallery/176300827/Lenkey-Janos-Primary-School-Yard (Accessed: 24 December 2025).

Duolingo (n.d.) About us. Available at: https://www.duolingo.com/info (Accessed: 11 October 2025).

Duolingo (2024, 7 August) Duolingo hits 100 M MAUs, reports 59% DAU growth and 41% revenue growth. Available at: https://investors.duolingo.com/news-releases/news-release-details/duolingo-hits-100m-maus-reports-59-dau-growth-and-41-revenue (Accessed 11 October 2025).

Duolingo (2025) Typography. [Online] Available at: https://design.duolingo.com/identity/typography (Accessed: 11 October 2025).

Encyclopaedia Britannica (2025) Morse Code [Online]. Available at: https://britannica.com/topic/Morse‑Code (Accessed: 24 December 2025).

Guerrero, N. (2024, 4 October) ‘Good, free, fun: The simple formula that has made Duolingo a daily habit for millions’, BBC Work Life, 4 October. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/worklife/article/20241004-the-simple-formula-that-made-duolingo-a-daily-habit-for-millions (Accessed: 11 October 2025).

Kozmana, K. (2022, 31 March) ‘We live to compete. What I learned by winning the Duolingo diamond league’, Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/@k.kozmana/doomed-to-compete-what-i-learned-by-winning-duolingos-diamond-league-76709bc85515 (Accessed: 11 October 2025).

Radio Society of Great Britain (2012) Morse Code Sheet 01. Available at: https://rsgb.org/main/files/2012/10/Morse_Code_Sheet_01.pdf (Accessed: 24 December 2025).

Ratel, C. (2019) Incognito Mural [Online image]. Available at: https://www.behance.net/gallery/83803801/Incognito-Mural (Accessed: 24 December 2025).

Shortt, M., Tilak, S., Kuznetcova, I., Martens, B. and Akinkuolie, B. (2021) ‘Gamification in mobile-assisted language learning: a systematic review of Duolingo literature from public release of 2012 to early 2020’, Computer Assisted Language Learning, pp. 517–554. Available at: https://doi: 10.1080/09588221.2021.1933540.