<aside> 💡 Robert (he/they) is a bumbling queer brand + product designer based in Pittsburgh, currently having fun as a Senior Product Designer at Duolingo. As a designer, they care a ton about bringing product with creative direction, having worked on illustration-led rebrands, design system reboots, learning-based mini games, and 0-1 new product developments that heavily feature the Duolingo World Characters. Outside of work, they spend too much time watching reality TV game shows, playing Nintendo games, and writing lore for their drag persona.

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🫂 Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Robert, and I’m a Senior Product Designer in the Monetization Area at Duolingo, which creates features for the app’s most dedicated users, while also staying within Duolingo’s larger mission of focusing on free education and free language learning. I’ve been at Duolingo for about three years now previously was at Carnegie Mellon School of Design where I graduated from with a Communications Design degree.

🫂 How does design in the Monetization area look different from design in other teams at Duolingo?

Within Monetization, we're targeting the most highly dedicated learners. From a UX perspective, we want to go a step above “bite-sized language learning”, like in the normal app, and build features that help learners go deeper and learn longer. We have features like the Practice Hub, which lets you practice to a greater depth than before, and Unlimited Hearts, which let you keep learning even if you make mistakes.

From a visual perspective, something I ended up working on was an entirely bespoke design system that differentiates the normal Duolingo app from the subscription app, Super Duolingo. The difference between the two is night and day. The design of Super Duolingo needed to be entirely different from the normal Duolingo app while making sure the screens related to Super Duolingo were still recognizable at a glance. Duolingo is already a very colorful app so we were interested in how we could use colors in this new space while making sure they still felt and looked like Duolingo. We ended up going from using flat colors in the normal Duolingo app to more gradient colors in Super Duolingo.

Duolingo’s mascot, Duo, in his Super Duolingo colors

🫂 What skills that you gained from the School of Design help you most in your work at Duolingo?

CMU School of Design was a lot more traditional teaching at first. I learned a lot about traditional print, traditional digital, and working with type and color and scale. Moving into Junior and Senior year, it started to delve more deeply into the digital space. At that point, I was learning more about apps, internet of things, and conversational user interfaces. When I started working at Duolingo, it felt natural to be thinking about problems in that way given that I had already worked on brand systems in the past at CMU.

I’m always thinking about narratives, messages, world building, and lore. When I think about Duolingo, a company that has a pretty big character cast,  I’m always thinking about ways to highlight those characters as much as I can in the features that I'm building for Super Duolingo. We have the story of Duo, so I’m always asking myself “how can we make him feel even bigger, better, and more charming?”.

🫂 Is there anything you wish you learned while at school that comes up a lot in your work?

Metrics and looking at things from a business perspective are things you don’t really get at school. A lot of the projects that you work on are very much in the “blue sky” realm. Even when there are limitations on a project, you can't test out the decisions you make. A lot of the work that I do now goes through the experiment funnel pretty immediately, and I'm able to see actual user responses to the things that I'm trying to make.

Another thing I didn’t get a chance to work a lot on in school were long-term projects. At Duolingo, you're always going to be working with the same types of people and building those relationships on a bigger scale than you would ever realize when you're in college. Having to also make those connections and relationships with executives is also something you don’t get a chance to do until you join a company, and it’s something I’m still trying to improve on.

<aside> 🌀 Bobert gave an awesome talk at Config, Figma’s annual conference, titled “Embracing Art to Enhance Your Product”. The talk touches on how Duolingo Design uses Figma to create a design system that highlights the brand’s World Characters as well as why Duolingo’s character cast is so important to their product and brand.

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🫂 You gave a super cool and interesting talk at Config about using art when designing products. What were your main goals with that talk?