📲🔥 How to Keep Users Coming Back to Your Fintech App Every Day

10 product lessons from Duolingo's team

Duolingo's streak feature is a key component of its success as a language learning app.

It is designed to encourage daily engagement and make language learning a habit.

The streak tracks how many consecutive days a user has completed at least one lesson.

It’s not just a simple counter; it has evolved through hundreds of experiments and iterations, with the team constantly refining the user experience. It also highlights the importance of combining a valuable core product, with an engaging feature to retain users.

Duolingo views the streak as a "golden goose," as the feature has been instrumental in driving daily active users (DAU) and the company's overall growth and success.

Duolingo is a great source of inspiration. Back in January I shared how Sarwa, one of UAE’s leading fintech app, has looked at Duolingo as a source of inspiration to gamify their app experience.

😱 Is Visa building a digital bank? 💸 How to Create Wealth for Everyone: an exclusive interview with Sarwa.

In today’s edition, I’ll share 10 valuable lessons from Duolingo for fintech apps looking to increase daily user engagement:

1. ➡️ Make the core action simple and clear

2. ⚙️ Test everything

3. 🧠 Understand user psychology

4. 💬 Use notifications effectively

5. 👌 Provide flexibility while valuing perfection

6. 🔎 Prioritise clarity

7. 🗓️ Focus on the zero to seven day experience

8. 🥅 Make it meaningful

9. ✨ Use animation, haptics and sound

10. 🪧 Ensure visible progress

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Make the core action simple and clear

Duolingo moved from an XP-based streak to a one-lesson-a-day streak.

This made it easier for users to extend their streak. A fintech app should identify a simple, daily action that users can easily perform to maintain their "streak," and it should be directly tied to the app's core value proposition.

“One of the most impactful experiments we ran was about, was to move from a XP based streak to just do one lesson a day, and you'd extend your streak.

And the risk that you can sort of imagine is, well, then users kind of care less about it because it's not connected with their goal. And we saw none of that. This was a huge driver of DAUs, just making it easier to extend your streak, but I think really importantly it's still meaningful.

The unit of use, and as you're thinking about building a streak, I think it's really important to think about what the unit of use of your app is. The unit of use for Duolingo is doing a lesson.”

➡️ Think about what is the unit of use for your fintech app.

Test everything

Duolingo has run over 600 experiments on streaks in the last four years, or roughly every other day. This included testing copy, where they changed the call to action on a goal screen from "Continue" to "Commit to My Goal" which led to a massive win.

A fintech app can adopt a similar approach, constantly testing different strategies to motivate users, from copy changes to feature modifications.

For example, testing different call-to-action phrases, user interface layouts, or different notification timings, and pay close attention to what resonates with users.

“Test everything. We've run in the last four years over 600 experiments on the streaks, so every other day. We've actually set up really good infrastructure for copy testing. We used to say continue, our standard CTA is continue, and we changed that to commit to my goal, and it was a massive win.”

Understand user psychology

Duolingo has learned about motivating and demotivating users through experiments.