.png)
HOT STREAK
Role and Collaboration:
Sole designer on the project. Worked with a creative director to develop the concept and collaborated with an animator and copywriter to bring the experience to life.
Problem Statement:
Daily streaks were effective at bringing learners back to the app, but returning didn’t necessarily mean spending more time learning. A previous experiment, Spree, showed that asking learners to complete more lessons each day could make the habit harder to sustain.
Hot Streak explored how to encourage additional learning without adding to that daily burden.
What we tried before and why it didn't work:
Before there was Hot Streak, they was Spree. Spree encouraged learners to complete at least three lessons in a course every day to build a separate streak. But daily active users (DAUs) declined.
To understand why, the UXR team conducted a study and found that the added daily requirement made the learning habit harder to sustain, encouraging binge-like behavior and burnout that contributed to the decline.
Getting learners to do more shouldn't come at the cost of getting them to return.
Initial direction:
Challenge learners with playful, taunting copy to do one more lesson and watch their streak grow bigger and hotter. The goal was to encourage learners to come back the next day and complete more than one lesson, increasing Time Spent Learning (TSL).
Explored starting with a tiny “baby streak” that learners could grow, kind of like a Tamagotchi. Each extension came with encouraging copy to grow the streak.
.png)
Explored making the streak grow bigger and hotter, with an indicator between the first and second extension to show there was more to unlock. Each extension came with increasingly playful, teasing copy.
Final direction:
I identified a risk in repeating Spree’s hard-handed approach, which had made the learning habit harder to sustain. Instead, I proposed rewarding additional effort rather than pushing learners to do more.
The hypothesis was that learners who naturally completed more than one lesson a day would discover they could earn a Hot Streak. That reward could motivate them to return the next day and complete another extra lesson, without turning it into a daily requirement. Which in return will increase Time Spent Learning Metrics.
If the hypothesis proved true, the next step would be to design additional touchpoints across the app, such as showing how many Hot Streaks a learner earned in a week or month. This would celebrate extra learning without introducing another daily count, since we had learned that maintaining more than one lesson a day is difficult over time.
I also removed the streak count and calendar, since they added little value after the first streak extension.
