One of us used a language app for most of a year. The front screen had a progress bar, and in March it said thirty seven percent. In April it still said thirty seven percent, because that spring went badly and nobody opened the app.
Coming back to it felt awful. The problem was not forgotten words. It felt like getting a school report from your own phone. The app was deleted that week, and that bar is the reason EvoluteMe describes progress in words first.
Thirty seven percent of what
Of the chapters somebody divided the course into. A progress bar has never counted anything else. Turn nine pages out of ten and it says ninety, even if you cannot do a single thing you came to learn.
So the number is accurate about pages turned and says nothing about you. That would be a small problem if people read it as pages turned, but nobody does. "Thirty seven" is read as a fact about the person holding the phone: thirty seven percent ready, thirty seven percent of the way to speaking Spanish.
With a child this happens faster and more strongly. A child does not separate "the course is a third done" from "I am a third clever". A parent looking at the same number starts talking about the number: why thirty seven, when it was thirty five yesterday? By that point nobody in the room has asked what the child actually cannot do.
What we show instead
We show a place. At any moment EvoluteMe first answers one question: what do you do now? The next lesson is named in the words you would use yourself, and it takes about ten minutes. On a long route, where it helps, a figure next to it says how much of the route is behind you and how much is ahead. That figure describes the route. It does not judge the person on it.
You notice the difference on the day you come back. After five weeks away you open the app. A bar tells you exactly what it told you in March, and all it adds is guilt. A place tells you something useful: the check remembers what you knew well and what was shaky, the route continues from a real point, and tonight you are going over loans and interest. That is something you can do tonight. You cannot do thirty seven percent tonight.
The same rule applies inside a lesson. A wrong answer takes nothing off any bar. The mentor talks it through with you, and the route adjusts without any fuss: the topic you got wrong comes back in a few days and is not lost in an average.
What the adults see
A parent, a teacher and a manager all want the same thing, and it is not a verdict on a person. They want to know where to help.
So the parent screen says where the child stopped and what is worth going through together this evening. A teacher gets a class summary: who has gone quiet, which mistake keeps coming back, and what to go over with the whole class. A manager sees which competencies are closed and how the assigned courses are going.
All three screens use words, and none of them shows a figure about the person. A number next to a name gets compared with the name below it. We keep that comparison out: no marks for a child, no ranking of pupils, no ranking inside a team.
Where a number is welcome
We are not against numbers. We are against a number that means something other than what it shows. It all depends on what the figure is attached to. A percent of the route counts steps, and steps exist. A percent of mastery tries to count a person, and there is nothing there to count.
Points spent from a wallet are an honest number: this much went on building a course, this much came back when the work cost less than the estimate. A pace that a team sets for itself, for example a lesson on four days a week, is honest too, because it counts what happened and not what somebody is. The result goes to the group lead and never to the person as a score. A family screen has no counter of that kind at all. A parent sees when the last lesson was, with nothing to compare it against, because at home a count of weeks turns into an argument about the count.
"You studied four days out of seven" is a fact you can argue with. "You are thirty seven percent complete" is a verdict that looks like a fact.
Yes, but motivation
This is the objection we hear most, and it is a fair one. Will people keep going without a figure about themselves? Our answer starts with what happens when a number stops moving. A figure about the route stops harmlessly: it still says where you are, like a bookmark. A figure about the person turns into a verdict. Thirty seven percent ready, and still thirty seven percent ready in April. Opening the app starts to hurt, and most people solve that by not opening it. A day counter does the same once something depends on it. Fear of losing a number motivates well for two weeks and badly by the third month.
We are betting on something duller. The next step is always there, always named, and always small enough to start. You have fifteen minutes after the children are asleep, and you already know what the step will be about. People will come back for that or they will not come back at all, and we would rather find that out honestly.
Has that bet paid off? We do not know yet. EvoluteMe has not launched, and we have nothing real to measure. When we do, we will write it up, even if it turns out we were wrong.
What it costs us
Mostly it is awkward. People are used to a number about themselves, and the first days without one feel oddly empty. The corner of the screen is not blank: on a long route a figure there says how much of it is behind you. But that figure is about the route. Somebody who comes from an app full of levels has nothing to measure themselves against, and keeps looking for the number that used to grade them.
It also takes us longer to explain. "How far along am I" is a four word question, and our answer takes two sentences: here is where you stopped, here is what comes next. That is harder to put on a landing page than a number.
And without a figure per person you cannot make a good-looking report for management. Such a figure makes reporting easy and says nothing about whether anyone learned anything, and we left it out deliberately. Some buyers will choose a competitor for exactly this reason.
We think the trade is right anyway. A product that shows you a number about yourself every day starts to feel like an examiner, and almost nobody learns well from an examiner.
What we are building next is on the roadmap. A figure that measures the person is not on it, and we are not going to add one.
