EdTech & Management · 2023
Lessons short enough that people finish them
An app for learning Arabic. Five skills — vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, writing and listening — in sessions you can finish in a coffee break.
- Sector
- EdTech & Management
- Our role
- UX/UI design
- Year
- 2023
Led by Bahaa Hawari, founder of BeCollabs.
- 5
- Skills practised in one path
- 2
- Surfaces — web and app
The challenge
Nobody decides to quit a language app. They miss two days, the streak breaks, and the reason to open it again quietly disappears. Arabic makes that worse: a new alphabet, a new reading direction, and sounds that a written exercise cannot check at all. If the first week feels like homework, the learner is gone before they reach anything satisfying.
Our approach
We made the sessions short on purpose — short enough to finish in the gap a person actually has, so finishing is the normal outcome instead of the rare one. Then we put the reward at the end of each session rather than at the end of a level, so every attempt pays off. Pronunciation practice and progress are part of the lesson itself, not separate sections you have to remember to visit. We worked with language teachers on the order of the material, and alongside the developers on both the app and the site, so the two never drifted apart.
The outcome
A path built around finishing rather than starting, where every short session ends in something that feels like progress.
Get in touch
Tell us what is stuck
Thirty minutes, no slides needed. Tell us the problem and we will come back with our first read on it.
What happens next
- 1. You pick a time, or just send us the problem.
- 2. We reply within one working day.
- 3. You get our first read on it. No charge, no deck.