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The owl: symbol of wisdom, knowledge, transformation and good fortune. What better herald of the New Year could I hope for, winging its silent way into my inbox? Sadly, however, the owl in question is not Athena’s companion, swooping low over my personal battlefield to signal imminent victory in ongoing fights, as it was said to do for the Ancient Greeks. No, this creature is a Kermit-green animation, only too vocal and emotionally volatile in alarming ways.
I refer, of course, to Duo. The crazy anthropomorphised personification that pursues users of the Duolingo language-learning app, with his huge eyes, cutesy beak, tufty feathers and mastery of arch emotional manipulation. As the last person in my family and social circle to sign up, this summer I embarked on Duolingo’s Italian course on my smartphone. Ever since, there has been a flapping and hooting nag on my tail.
The emails have subject fields that veer from, “We missed you last week!” to, “Your Italian skills are getting mouldy” (complete with nausea emoji). At the more extreme end is a full-on weep from Duo lamenting that he’s been dumped. Those big eyes sure do fill up quickly, but us unfeeling humans should expect nothing less: “You made Duo sad — but he kept learning without you.”
One tactic employed if you take a break is making you feel bad that rivals are pulling ahead — with a ticker of how many words and phrases you could have amassed. The chastising is tempered with a bit of hand-holding: “Duo believes in you . . . don’t give up”. The company also employs other animated characters that populate the language-lesson scenarios to tempt me back. How about this pass-ag missive: “So keep on learning Italian. Or don’t”, delivered by a frosty purple-haired female with sardonically hooded eyes known as Lily — “an introverted, unenthused, deadpan goth teen, who secretly cares a lot”, according to a fan site.
Clearly the company’s systems have felt my own froideur in response, because the follow up messages contain a melting face and take a new tack: “Am I coming on too strong?”
Yes, Duo, you most definitely are. When I was a teenager this sort of behaviour used to earn the term “hassle merchant”. But the team at company HQ insist on calling him (and yes, he does “identify as male” because I checked) “our friendly mascot”. With the awful January self-improvement pressure upon us, I wondered if we can understand a bit more about motivation from all this.
When I enquired, Duolingo charmingly told me that a deliberately passive aggressive message is proven to be “one of the most effective at getting people to keep learning”. They sent me chapter and verse on their “gamification mechanics” — the justification for why they repeatedly let that owl loose on people. The short answer is it works for most, or at least enough of us, “significantly increasing retention rates”, according to the company. It’s all A/B tested on groups of learners, down to the frequency and tone of Duo’s notifications, from regret through to just this side of aggressive.
A consultation with friends and colleagues yielded a quite revolting level of overachievement. So many boasted about unbroken streaks (you build up credit and kudos through daily practice) — but alongside tales of terror about losing them. My kids introduced me to an online world of memes where Duo comically harasses people. The company’s own spoof marketing for a non-existent show “Duolingo on Ice” (featuring musical numbers such as Spanish or Vanish) includes a terrified woman complaining, “They took my son!” as the owls skate away.
You can only employ this sort of self-mocking humour when a strategy works. I guess most people at least tolerate being “nudged” so crudely towards self-improvement.
Not all of us react well to being hounded. But January is a time for fresh starts so I have today caved in to the feathered one’s endless nagging: I went through another irritating Italian lesson, negotiating once more the purchase of a discounted backpack. If Duo and Lily would accompany me to the Uffizi and converse about Botticelli, we might get along a whole lot better. But how would that do in the A/B testing? Maybe for the sake of awkward customers like me, they could try it. Buon anno a tutti!
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