Let’s 聊天 (Chat) on HelloTalk: A Product Review
Introduction
I first used HelloTalk after I left Taiwan in the Summer of 2017. I had just finished my 2-month self-discovery trip and arrived back in California. I decided to start using HelloTalk because my teacher recommended it to me. This language exchange app solved a personalized issue for me: after traveling abroad and learning a new language, it’s hard to maintain your knowledge base and fluency once you go home. However, HelloTalk made this issue disappear! HelloTalk made it fun and easy for me to keep up and even improve my language skills. It also gave my parents a break as my only Mandarin language partners!
Product Overview
HelloTalk is a language exchange mobile app that provides amazing opportunities to learn and build on your language skills. Language learning is primarily done by chatting with native speakers of the language you are trying to learn. HelloTalk also provides access to a newsfeed functionality called Moments, which allows you to learn more about the lives of those who live in the country of your desired language.
Product Goals
Given that the app attracts many passionate language learners, I would say the goal of the app is two-fold. One, it is important for the platform to have active engagement from its users. Active users are especially important for HelloTalk since being online to chat is crucial for learning. Secondly, conversion rate is important for HelloTalk. Since there aren’t many ads on the platform, I would assume paying users are an important part of HelloTalk’s business model.
Users
From what I can tell as an external user of HelloTalk, users fall in the following buckets:
- Passionate language learners of all ages
- People looking for a community of fellow language learners
- People who have an incomplete mastery of a language (that they have learned previously)
- People who want to improve their language skill but are bored with traditional learning methods
- People who enjoy or prefer learning a language by talking, chatting, and listening with a real person
Use Cases
- A user opens the application to continue a conversation with 1+ users
- A user opens the application to post a moment with 0+ followers
- A user opens the application to scroll through Moments
- A user opens the application to start a new conversation with 1+ users
- A user opens the application to use the Learn courses
Product Goals
Given that the app attracts many passionate language learners, I would say the goal of the app is two-fold. One, it is important for the platform to have active engagement from its users. Active users are especially important for HelloTalk since being online to chat is crucial for learning. Secondly, conversion rate is important for HelloTalk. Since there aren’t many ads on the platform, I would assume paying users are an important part of HelloTalk’s business model.
What’s Great
In this section, I will quickly breakdown a few great things about HelloTalk. I will first touch on the built-in Incentive system that is the core of the application and then some features.
Incentive System
At the core of HelloTalk is the built-in incentive system that both language speakers have in the conversation. The fact that the other member of the conversation is a master in the language you wish to learn is brilliant. As a result, both members of the conversation are incentivized to talk to one another because the other member is someone who can help you learn a language that you desperately wish to learn. Without this, no user would be incentivized to converse with the other and I don’t believe this app would be very successful without this incentive system.
Moments
The newsfeed creates stickiness for users in the application as they want to see what native speakers do in their native country. This feature drives engagement and time on app for users.
Conversation Helpers
The conversation helpers in each conversation help effectively break the ice. They also give the conversation a potential direction for shy users. This feature helps prevent high churn and bounce rates by making conversation smoother.
Profile
Making the language learning experience a “social” one is a great idea. It humanizes the users of the app and gives you insight into the person you are talking to. This feature helps make the app feel more personal and relatable to users (as they can read the profiles and intentions of fellow language learners).
Banning of inappropriate topics
This feature is straightforward — it makes users feel safer on the platform (especially girls) and tells users that HelloTalk is serious about language learning. Examples of inappropriate topics are harassment for pictures, using abusive language, or using the platform to look for dates.
What Could Be Better
Engagement
Without looking at any analytics/data, I would assume one of the biggest (if not the biggest) issue for HelloTalk is driving engagement. How do you get users to come back to the app after 1 week? 1 month? 2 months? For me personally, I sometimes fall off the app for weeks because of how everything is on your own time — I don’t get penalized for not responding for 3 weeks and I don’t get rewarded for responding within 2 minutes.
Settings Icon
The icon or button to press to find extra features in the chat is not easily decipherable by users. Compared to how Line, Messenger, or WeChat afford this option to users, HelloTalk’s settings icon is not intuitive or consistent with these popular messaging platforms.
Freemium Business Model
Again, without looking at any data, I would assume that another potential issue for HelloTalk is their revenue from premium users. Personally, I would never pay for premium on HelloTalk because I do not think the free version is any worse than the premium (besides the # of translations). While I do think HelloTalk has an ample amount of premium users, I think there is potential for HelloTalk to acquire more users & increase revenue if they can improve their freemium model.
Potential Solutions
Push Notifications
I would utilize more push notifications to drive engagement and retention. Push notifications can target users who have not opened the app in a certain amount of time. This can potentially drive engagement by decreasing the churn rate and increasing the amount of repeat/return visitors to HelloTalk. You could observe the success of these push notifications by:
- analyzing the clickthrough rates of users on these push notifications
- analyzing how engagement with HelloTalk changes after clicking the notification by observing their user flow.
Loyalty System
I would create a sense of gamification or loyalty in the conversations to increase engagement. In this way, you do not need to punish inactive users, but, instead, incentivize active users. For example, you could reward users who reach X number of messages with their partner over the span of a week. You could also utilize a reward system like Uber to try and incentivize engagement on the application. You could observe the success of such loyalty system by:
- analyzing the number of messages sent in conversations that are A/B testing this gamification compared to the # of messages sent in conversations without this gamification
- analyzing the length of overall text in conversations that are A/B testing this gamification vs. those that are not testing it
Optimizing the Freemium Business Model
Graphical Display of Pros/Cons list for freemium
- Show a more compelling argument for the differences between free and VIP Membership. This is how Spotify and Evernote pitch their differing levels of membership:
Essentially, HelloTalk needs to do a better job of showcasing the deficiencies of the Basic/Free version and highlighting the pros of the VIP Membership. By creating a similar screen in the app, HelloTalk might be able to increase conversion of free users. Offering a trial might also increase a user’s willingness to try VIP out. You could observe the success of such screens by:
- Comparing the conversion rate before & after the UI facelift
- Comparing the clickthrough rate of this screen/popup with the old screen
If HelloTalk finds that clickthrough rates of this screen are high, but conversion rates are not increasing, HelloTalk might come to realize that their value proposition is not strong enough.
How can HelloTalksolve for this? Go back to your users, use cases, and user flows. Create features and functionalities in the Premium version that HelloTalk users will care about. Maybe HelloTalk will find that they don’t care about exclusive stickers, but, instead, care about exclusive features like free HelloTalk swag.
Summary
In all, I would recommend any passionate language learner to give HelloTalk a try. While there are some things that could be better, the experience is great overall. If you do end up checking it out, come chat with me! For now, 再见.
