Streak Earn Back
Team
1 product designer, 1 product manager
Duration
4 weeks
Impact
24% increase in DAUs
When learners lose their streak, it becomes a huge churning point. How do we allow learners to get their streaks back?
Streaks help language learners build a habit and is one of the biggest retention features Duolingo. There are already in-app purchases to restore a user's streak, but we also want to capture the users who don't want to pay to restore their streak.
With the Earn Back Challenge, users can earn back their streaks by doing a series of review lessons!
When users return to the app after losing their streak, they'll be prompted to either do the Earn Back Challenge or pay to repair their streak. We hypothesized that it might hurt monetization a bit by offering a free way to repair their streak, but the retention trade-off would be worth it.
If users exit the Earn Back Challenge at any point, we allow them two days to come back to the challenge to restore their streak.
Once users finish the challenge, they'll see a success screen that indicates they have earned back their streak!
Is a slight monetization hit worth it at first? Yes! If it means more user retention long term.
Before we started the project, my PM and I discussed that it could potentially be a negative on monetization. Instead of paying to get your streak back, users can now get it back for free. However, we discussed with the monetization team and they agreed to let us test it out. After the experiment, it became obvious that the benefits of higher user retention became more important than the slight red in monetization!