Biggest advantage is it encourages you to spend more time inside lessons and stories. I was hung up on losing the choice that the old layout allowed, but I’ve come around to the thinking that choosing which lesson to do next is a huge distraction and waste of time. It doesn’t really matter if you pick the lesson on the left or the right or a level 4 lesson a few rows back, at least not enough to warrant your time and energy. Just let duo handle it and jump right into the big “START” prompt, if you’re an active user it could add up to saving you hours of time you’d otherwise have to waste modeling those choices in your head. Kudos to the product team for pushing through all the negativity and change aversion online.

In the spirit of optimizing for “time spent inside lessons and stories” / “time in-app”, I would also love to have a feature that’s just a focus mode or zen mode where all the gamification and popups and menu UIs are disabled and you are purely inside a lesson and story treadmill going down the tree. No interruptions for completing lessons, daily tasks, moving up a leaderboard or anything like that, just a streamlined learning simulation optimized for flow. Hopefully something to consider if anyone in product reads this sub.