Improving retention by 10% through encouraging pre-schoolers to learn together
PURPOSE
To increase retention and acquisition rates with features that sat outside of the core daily lesson.
ROLE
Design Manager / Lead Product Designer
BACKGROUND
Lingumi is a language-learning app for young children that turns short daily lessons into playful adventures through games, songs, and teacher-led videos. It helps preschoolers learn socially and confidently while parents track their progress.
RESPONSIBILITIES
A fun return to IC work at Lingumi, where I helped design joint growth and retention features. I collaborated across three squads to make sure our work was ethical, linguistically sound, and scalable. My role covered research, testing, and final delivery of visuals, interactions, and sharing flows.
OPPORTUNITIES
Daily lessons unlock once per day, as a way to pace learning and limit screen time; a core principle of Lingumi’s. But our research showed two clear patterns: parents loved sharing screenshots of their kids learning, and both children and their parents wanted to replay favourite challenges.
Lingumi had a treasure chest of single-use activities but no way to revisit them, learn together, or share progress. There were no built-in rewards or social moments, and no way for parents to share and celebrate the progress of their children. Our goal was to change that.
THE IDEAS
We introduced a section outside of the daily lesson, with the option to replay lesson activities, to complete a daily post-lesson challenge and be rewarded with badges and framed photos, and critically with parental controls to safeguard the young learners.
We introduced a section outside of the daily lesson, with the option to replay lesson activities, to complete a daily post-lesson challenge and be rewarded with badges and framed photos, and critically with parental controls to safeguard the young learners. Challenge responses could be shared, and children were being rewarded with a small token for completing their lessons.
Challenge responses could be shared, and children were being rewarded with a small token for completing their lessons.
Image source: Unsplash
Using community ‘friends’ like Lucy – a young native English speaker – and the other teachers taking part in challenges gave us a chance to spur on children who might not have Lingumi-using friends to share their progress with.
Alongside this, stricter parental controls and an area to manage these ‘friends’ was created, where parents could accept and send requests using their unique Lingumi code. This also allowed parents to share their awards externally across relevant social medias and WeChat.
THE RESULTS
11%
lift in Daily Active Users
6%
higher activision rates than previous months
Less tangibly, we also saw a lot more recommendations come naturally through the new 'Invite a friend' channels we'd created, and more interactions on social media with parents showing the success of their children.