Quiz Mode: A New Way to Learn Vocabulary in Drops

Quiz Mode is a new gameplay type I pitched and developed with the vision of delivering meaningful learning experiences to Drops learners. Drops makes learning a new language easy by building your vocabulary with fun games. Those games are largely rote learning opportunities, until now!

Quiz Mode is designed to pair the useful words and phrases you collect in your daily sessions with contextualized questions for a personalized review session. In each encounter with Quiz Mode, you'll be presented with various types of questions that test your understanding of those words and phrases. Some questions might ask you to match a phrase with the contexts you would use it, while others might ask you to use your new vocabulary to describe what’s going on in a picture, or require you to spot the odd one out of a group of terms.

I oversaw this project from idea through iteration:

💡 I pitched the idea, focused on solving a key problem: how might we create meaningful review activities in Drops?

👷🏼 I collaborated with our engineering lead to create a program that our learning team could use to produce questions and set restrictions for various languages, question types, and number of answers. This set the groundwork for creating scalable questions that could appear with multiple answer options in 45+ languages.

✅ To make sure learners could access the review mode early in their learning journey, I lead my team in creating hundreds of questions and continuously crunched the numbers to make sure we covered a majority of our most popular content.

📝 To ensure we nailed the voice and tone, I lead meetings and internal testing sessions with our Learning Team and UX Writer to make sure we got the formula just right.

🌐 I oversaw the localization process, created documentation, and fielded questions from our translators to maintain the quality of our quiz questions both as a UI and learning language.

🫱🏻‍🫲🏽 I helped develop, design, and test the gameplay with our product team, bringing this idea to life!

📊 We built and ran a successful AB test prior to launch to capture initial user behavior. We found that learners who interacted with Quiz Mode consistently had an incredible boost in D1-D10-D30 retention rates.

📣 I wrote marketing material (see the blog post above) for the launch and presented the feature to stakeholders.

⚙️ I monitored learner feedback (users loved it!) and oversaw the iteration of this MVP—creating more questions to cover more content and laying the groundwork for language-specific questions.

You can try out Quiz Mode today by downloading Drops and learn more about how it improves learning efficiency in my blog post (linked above).

(Pro-tip: finish the Starter Pack topic and you'll unlock several questions right away!)