Babbel | Growth | Q1 2025
Problem
Leads don’t buy the Babbel subscription because they aren’t able to complete more than 1 lesson in the freemium experience.
Solution
Designed a locked lesson page to showcase what users will learn both within the first lesson and once they unlock more lessons through subscription.
Outcome
Results of an A/B test have shown a 3% uplift in revenue metrics and the feature was rolled out on both plaforms.
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
3 weeks
Team
1 Product Designer
1 Senior Product Manager
2 Senior iOS Engineers
2 Senior Android Engineers
Context
Our team was formed in Q3 2024 with a clear focus: driving revenue by improving the Lead experience in the Babbel app.
To better understand the problem space, I searched for relevant studies in our research repository.
The existing research insights were outdated and not actionable, so I pitched, designed and lead the research of the Lead experience which was pivotal in shaping strategic initiatives within this space.
Generative research
Together with a UX Research Intern that I mentored, we focused our efforts on two core questions:
Who are the Leads at Babbel?
What do they need to experience in order to convert?
With these clear objectives, we conducted 5 user interviews.
Key learning
Constraints
An obvious direction to take would be to unlock more lessons within the freemium experience.
Due to technical and staffing constraints, we couldn’t expand the freemium access to more lessons.
This pushed us to explore alternatives that could still meet the same user needs, but within our team’s technical capabilities.
Competitor analysis
Locking content behind a paywall is a common practice among our competitors. We realised that we can still showcase the information our Leads are missing without unlocking the lessons.
This is how the Locked Lesson Page experiment idea was born. Leads didn’t necessarily need more lessons, but they wanted to have more overview of what to expect from the overall learning experience.
Evaluative research
I identified 2 areas of interest with an even amount of evidence in research:
Learning plan - people want to know what they will learn in upcoming lessons.
Vocabulary - people are excited to know what specific vocabulary they will learn within the lesson.
A preference test has shown that 75% of Leads preferred the learning plan overview, because it helps them understand the value they will get from Babbel in the long run.
Final designs
The final designs included all the information necessary for a Lead to evaluate their mid- to long-term learning experience with Babbel.
The information like duration, skills, topic of the lesson as well as the following lessons in the unit were all carefully selected based on the insights from our research.
Personal learnings
Leverage early engineering collaboration - this project involved fetching lots of lesson data which wasn't accessible without looking into code. Working closely with an engineer to get that information was invaluable and I’m planning to take this practice into my future projects.
Don’t reinvent the wheel - competitor analysis can help me find already existing solutions to the problems I’m facing. It’s not as straightforward as copying the exact solution, but it can spark ideas which can unblock the problem-solving process.
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