10 Years of Mondly | 10 Stories – Story 6: Let’s Start at the End

“Let’s start at the end. There’s a person that loves you.”

The first few words of Samuel Hulick’s The Elements of User Onboarding stayed with the Mondly team.

A well-known guide to UX and design, the clear, simple, and empathetic approach it recommends chimed with what Mondly was creating.

The user’s voice needed to be heard and prioritized at every stage of the process.

Ready to listen

“‘This doesn’t work’. ‘I want this to be better’ — users would give us direct feedback on what they wanted to be different,” says Alex Negrila, Principal Developer & Technical Lead.

That feedback wasn’t tucked away for a quiet moment — it was a priority.

From lesson content to leaderboards, Mondly engineers worked round the clock to bring improvements and suggestions to life.

“It gave colleagues a sense of purpose and general empowerment,” Alex continues, “they’d know that in two or three days, what they’d working on would be deployed to a million users.

“Getting that feedback, making changes, and feeling like your work is appreciated is always a rush.”

Visualizing the experience

One glance inside the Mondly office in Brașov shows just how central Mondly users are.

On the walls are hundreds of printed screenshots — from Mondly and competitors — weaving their way neatly across the office walls.

Every stage of the user journey, right in front of you.

“They made a digital product physical in order to see every step and look at how they could have an optimal user flow. That’s the level of focus on the detail”, says Brenden Mielke, VP Product, English Language Learning at Pearson, remembering his first trip to the Mondly HQ.

An award-winning result

Listening to users resulted in an engaging, easy-to-use product that kept people coming back.

“Everything was organic,” explains Alex Iliescu. “The AppStore would just surface the best apps and people would find them.

“So our ‘marketing’ was to build a great app — make it easy, make it fun, make them happy, make them write a review; interact with the bad reviews and make sure you fix it. We tried to execute on all those things”.

The efforts paid off, and by the end of 2018, Mondly hit one million reviews on Google Play and the AppStore, as well as picking up an “Apps We Love” award from the Oculus store.

High levels of customer satisfaction also led to Mondly being awarded “Best Online Language Learning Portal” by the German Institute for Service Quality in mid 2019.

Be the user

Today, listening to users remains a top priority.

“We look at reviews, and we read what people are saying on social media,” explains Cristian Balau, Mondly’s Marketing Director.

“Even at ad level, we read the comments on the ad to understand what people think of the product and the ad content so we can refine and improve it”.

But as Mondly continues to grow, how can the team stay close to the user experience?

Be the user! Every team member is learning a language, experiencing the entire user journey — being amazed when it works and frustrated when the capability isn’t there yet.

THE MILESTONES 

• 1 million reviews on Google Play and AppStore (Dec 2018) 

• Alexandru Iliescu and Tudor Iliescu are awarded the “Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year: Technology & Innovation” prize by Ernst & Young (Feb 2019) 

• 33 employees (Jan 2019) 

• 1500 free lessons (Feb 2019)  

• Apps we love on oculus store (March 2019) 

• Best online language learning portal award by the German Institute for Service Quality (July 2019) 

• 50 million downloads (Sept 2019)