Drops Units: Revamping the Learning Structure

When I first joined Drops, I was eager to get my hands on the vocabulary. As Head of Learning Content at Drops, I was responsible for the production and curation of their 50 language courses, which means I decided which topics to include and how to organize them.

Over the years, Drops had hundreds of topics spanning a couple dozen categories, and it was starting to get unwieldy. We identified some key learner pain points:

🧶 Categories were too long 📐
Each category was getting to be too long for learners to find things easily. For example, "Food & Drinks" had nearly 30 topics, so even if they were interested in our topic on restaurant phrases, they were unlikely to find it.

🐌 Learners were churning 💨
Our learners were working through categories one topic at a time. This introduced a high risk of churn if they came across a topic that wasn't relevant to them.

✨ Our new topics were outshining our old ones 🪦
During my time at Drops, we produced over 200 new topics with thousands of words and phrases, and with each new launch we learned more about how to teach our languages better! Our old topics needed a bit of a makeover.

So what did we do?!

After a variety of tests as we created new content, I called for a complete restructuring of the learning content. This meant taking every vocabulary term from Drops and grouping them into new topics. We also introduced a new level of hierarchy: Units. This allowed learners to find high-quality content that was relevant to them, in bite-sized units that were easier to achieve.

Learn more about the problems by clicking through the images below ⬇️