LearnMatch
A language learning app designed in three months in 2018, downloaded more than 2.5 million times since, and still running eight years later on the same interface and the same app icon.
- Client
- VE Vision Education, Austria
- Role
- Design Lead, Semas Studio
- Years
- 2018, a three-month engagement
- Outcome
- 2.5M+ downloads. Comenius EduMedia Seal, 2020
LearnMatch is a vocabulary app for people who learn in short bursts. It teaches 7 languages through an interface translated into more than 35, with live games against real opponents and a personal dictionary for words met in everyday reading.
The commercial life of the product added a second brief on top of the first. LearnMatch also ships as branded editions for companies and institutions, including T‑Mobile, Deloitte and Oxford University Press, and as LearnMatch Business, which trains the vocabulary of specific trades. One interface, many owners, many languages.
Learning is a football season
Most language apps count lessons. LearnMatch counts playing time and points, and puts every learner in a league with a promotion line. The profile is a shirt with a number, the points icon is a goal, the leaderboard is a league table. The metaphor is structural, not decorative: it measures what keeps people learning, minutes played and position against others, and turns consistency into competition.
The game is the lesson
The core loop is the game, not a textbook with points attached. A question is one prompt and four picture answers, with a ten-step progress bar so a session always has a visible end. The home screen leads with courses and live matches, and a timeline turns every short session into a visible result: points gained, a friend invited to a live match. Repetition is the part of vocabulary learning everyone quits, and the design gives it a scoreboard.
Built for languages it had never met
More than 35 interface languages for 7 learning languages is a design constraint before it is a translation task. Every label, button and game screen had to survive German compound nouns, short English verbs and scripts that run right to left, including Arabic, Farsi and Urdu, without a redesign per language. The interface answers with icons carrying the navigation, text containers with room to grow, and layouts that hold when a string doubles in length. New language editions ship on the same screens, not on redrawn ones.
One interface, many owners
The business model was the second brief. Branded editions and a business version mean other organizations put their name on the app. The design separates what an edition may change, its color, its mark and its content, from what it may not touch: layout, navigation and the game mechanics. That boundary is why very different clients can run the same app without breaking it, and why the interface carried eight years of new clients without a redesign.
Outcome
The app reached more than 2.5 million downloads and collected recognition year after year. In 2018 it was a finalist at the British Council ELTons for innovation in learner resources. In 2019 it took second place for Best Use of Mobile Learning at the Learning Technologies Awards in London and was named one of the Top 20 EdTechXGlobal startups. In 2020 it received the Comenius EduMedia Seal, a European quality seal for educational media, in the category of mother and foreign language education.
Eight years later, the interface and the app icon from the 2018 engagement are still the ones in the stores. The juries vetted the product. The market vetted it 2.5 million times.
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