Duolingo designs for failure. Here’s why your business should too

Becoming a customer’s habit is the goal of many businesses. Having them rely on you reduces the risk of price sensitivity and churn, and helps dissuade competitors from entering the market. When it comes to designing habit-building products for your customers, the secret you may have overlooked is this: helping them fail.

Consistency is key

We know that consistency is the biggest indicator of whether a habit will form. More important than whether the behaviour represents a small or big change, more important than the environment, and more important than rewards.

Your customer’s ability to do “the thing” on a regular basis is what really matters.

When it comes to designing products we should therefore focus on helping users return to the app, website or device as often as possible.

That’s why many apps, including Duolingo for language training, track and reward how many days in a row users have successfully shown up.

Once a streak is established, the sunk cost fallacy means users don’t want to let it go.

Streak to bleak

Capitalising on this fear of breaking the streak, some apps threaten to wipe a user’s progress back to zero if they miss a session. While this might make some people login on days they wouldn’t have otherwise, wiping progress wipes motivation, too.

The reality is that some days your customer just can’t (or shouldn’t) make using your product their focus. Maybe they are unwell. Perhaps a family crisis demands their time. A project at work might need all hands on deck. 

Based on this insight, diet app Lifesum introduced a new feature that nearly doubled its take-up. They allowed users an occasional “cheat meal” — something like pizza or a burger — for those days when motivation to eat well was a little wobbly. In short, they designed the apps for “failure states”, just as Duolingo does. 

Pick-up when they slip-up

Like losing a battle to win the war or taking one step back and two steps forward, failure-state thinking recognises that humans do not have stable levels of energy, desire or capacity. Instead of penalising people for off-days, this is about supporting your customer to achieve their bigger objective. Help them pick-up when they slip-up.

So knowing this, my question to you is: how can you learn from Duolingo, and use failure state thinking in your business to help your customers keep moving forward?

Opportunities for failure state solutions

To identify opportunities for failure state solutions, look for points of friction that can get in the way of your customer doing what you would like them to do. Here’s some to get you started:

• Initial client meetings: instead of your client feeling like meeting with you is step one of your process, let them know they are already two or three steps in (e.g. they’ve already done the hard part of deciding to do something about this issue). This gives them momentum and means they already feel like they’ve made progress;
• Invoice design: make how and when to pay the most obvious elements of your invoice so it is easy for them to make payment;
• On hold messages: stop interrupting hold music with ads or messages about how important your customer is. Constant interruption makes them more irritated and more likely to get surly when they finally speak with you;
• Websites: ensure your primary call-to-action stands out from the rest of the page so it’s easy for them to know what they should do next; and
• Email follow-ups: it’s best to assume they didn’t read your previous instruction. Rather than make them feel bad, acknowledge they are probably busy and recap why you are getting in contact.