Babbel
Bringing the culture to learners who couldn’t travel
Language learning, B2C mobile
Babbel Travel sold language trips to schools abroad. In March 2020 travel stopped, and the product with it. I joined as senior UX designer; during discovery the head of product switched my role to product manager so someone could steer the team.
01 · The problem
March 2020: the trips stopped
Before
Babbel Travel sold language trips to schools abroad.
March 2020
Travel stopped, and the product with it.
The real problem
Learners had no way to get close to the language. Alone, lessons felt repetitive and people dropped off.
So: how do we bring the country to them?
02 · My part
A 3-month plan to find out, cheaply
Question it
Mythbusters on our assumptions. Research objectives. Should progress-seekers come first?
Test it
Landing page smoke test, pop-up surveys in the product, customer support validating ideas.
Build it with people
Learners who had booked a trip, co-creation with language schools, virtual events and workshops.
03 · My part
How the research was run
8 in-depth interviews: 4 users and 4 non-users, 4 beginners and 4 intermediates, in English and Spanish. Two prompts did most of the work: “When you think of culture, what comes to mind?”, answered in words and then pictures, and “A foreign friend wants to learn your culture. Where should they start?”
04 · Key decision
One hypothesis, 5 cheap concepts
Before any concept, we agreed one hypothesis: closeness to the culture is what makes reviewing worth doing.
| Concept | What testing taught us | Where it landed |
|---|---|---|
| Culture Classroom | Live cooking, language and people at once was overload | Discarded |
| Culinary videos | Depends on content partners like Kitchen Stories | Exploring content |
| Marketplace of events | Partner schools already ran online events | Needs a pilot school |
| Guided video tour | Learners want to visit and talk to locals | Second test round |
| Passport To | Reuses podcasts and articles we already had | Prototyping |
05 · Key decision
We killed Culture Classroom
Cooking, language and live interaction at once was cognitive overload, and live cooking classes were far from our strengths and hard to scale. But learners really did want language and cooking together, so what survived became 2 cheaper ideas: culinary videos and the events marketplace.
06 · Key decision
Tested where learners already were
A guided food walk through Rome went out on Babbel Travel’s social channels. Passport To, audio stories from locals with quizzes, started with Edinburgh. I also worked with the game studio on in-app mini-games and connected every cultural experience back to what learners had studied, so it doubled as review.
Outcome
An audio adventure the Webbys noticed
The interactive audio story, Aventura on the Babbel Express, was named an Honoree in the 2024 Webby Awards, Science and Education Podcast category. The casual learning experiences got clearer goals, progress carried over from lessons, and tracking from day one.
What I'd do differently
What you count is what you'll build
What Learner Minutes told us
People were spending time in the cultural experiences.
What it never told us
Whether they were progressing.