Individulingo

Brainstorm

• Started from the brief "design again" and ran a collective brainstorm of technological controversies the team had experienced or read about, voted on and converged on Duolingo — an app everyone had their own history with.
• Ran a thoughtful-interaction-design critique: used the app over a set period, reflected on the experience against Duolingo's own stated design philosophy, and looked for inconsistencies between the two.
• Reflected openly as a team on our own position within the chosen design space, surfacing our biases before moving further.

Define

• Converged the brainstorm into a handful of concrete areas of interest, then a critical literature search to test whether Duolingo actually delivered on its own promise of effective, fun learning.
• Found less a flaw to critique than an opening: alternative learning theory pointed at a different method entirely, and at people already in school as an underserved audience.
• Brought the resulting design openings to a counselling session and were pushed to pick a target group — Duolingo claims a universal audience, but a universal design rarely is one.

Empathize

• Settled on high school students as the target group and built a co-design workshop, while in parallel reaching out to local schools for a two-hour session slot.
• Secured a visit to Ørestad Gymnasium and built probes to surface how students actually experienced Duolingo — and how they responded to alternative ways of learning a language.
• Synthesised the workshop data for recurring themes and significant interactions, forming the foundation for the design openings carried into prototyping.

Prototype

• Weighed a physical artifact against a digital one in a final critique session, and settled on digital as the right form for the product.
• Converged on four areas the design needed to address (below), and built a functioning UI in Figma around them.
• Time constraints meant the different motivational factors couldn't be properly A/B tested — the dynamic learning environment was simulated for the exposition instead of live-tested.

The four design principles

• Individulingo should support a more extended learning experience.
• Individulingo should address the individual's motivations for learning.
• Individulingo should incorporate dynamic tasks drawn from other teaching methods.
• Individulingo should keep a vibrant, minimalistic design aligned with Duolingo's existing visual language.

Test

• Presented the prototype at the semester's closing exposition, with a tablet and phone on hand so visitors could interact with it directly.
• Used the expo as both a presentation of the process and a live evaluation — a chance to critically reflect on the decisions made along the way.
• Key takeaway: the team had been too product-centered early on, which meant doubling back later and losing time. The research should have led the artifact, not the other way round — and more teachers and pedagogues should have been brought into the ideation phase from the start.