Preply is a language-learning platform that connects students with live tutors.
A typical student’s goal is to find and book a language tutoring session that fits their schedule. They need to quickly identify available times across dates and book a timeslot. They might also engage with any additional language-improvement features to improve their skills. To reflect this goal, my critique examines the student experience across onboarding, tutor discovery, booking, and practice features using Don Norman’s design principles.
Onboarding
Preply engages users at the visceral level through bright pinks and bold neo-brutalist elements. Microanimations reinforce this experience: selecting a goal triggers a representative illustration that animates on entry, followed by a second image that reflects the chosen outcome, supporting the user’s conceptual model.
Button taps trigger multimodal feedback (visual, auditory, and haptic), and selected states darken when pressed, confirming that the input was received and bridging the gulf of evaluation.
Finding a Tutor
After onboarding, I’m led to a filtered list of tutors matching my selections: Chinese speakers from Taiwan, who speak English as a second language, and charge under $20/session. This matched my conceptual model: my inputs directly tailored the results, and this feedback bridged the gulf of evaluation by showing the system’s current state.
I tried favouriting a tutor to save them for later. In marketplace apps—like Airbnb, Amazon, or job boards—favouriting is usually a private organizational tool, just for me.
But I unexpectedly received messages from two of the three tutors I’d “favourited,” and they now populate the messages tab. This felt intrusive, as users may reasonably expect favourites to function as a private bookmarking tool.
This violated my mental model of how favourites work in marketplace contexts. The heart icon was an ambiguous signifier: it could mean “bookmark for later” (private) or “express interest” (public). The system image provided no indication this was a social action. There was no written signifier like “Follow” or “Send Interest,” nor was there any warning about notifying tutors.
A well-designed feature should provide feedforward, bridging the gulf of execution by signalling consequences before I click. For example, the button could say “Follow & Notify Tutor” instead of just showing a heart icon, or a confirmation pop-up could appear: “Liking this tutor will notify them. Send like?” This would help prevent errors and cultural convention mismatches.
Booking Sessions
After selecting a tutor, you can view their schedule and book lessons. Redundant call-to-actions support multiple paths into the scheduling flow, which improves discoverability.
The schedule selector displays availability in your time zone, with gaps serving as signifiers and logical constraints; the visual space directly maps to the tutor’s availability. Time slots are organized into two columns: all “:00” times on the left, all “:30” times on the right. This spatial mapping makes scanning efficient; I can quickly find on the hour slots by looking left, or half-past slots by looking right, without reading each individual time.
As I go through the date selector, the selected date moves to the far left to show the subsequent week. You can only book up to 2 weeks in advance, and the tracking only starts moving toward the right-most position once you approach this limit. This is a lockout function that creates a digital constraint preventing bookings far in the future. The date selector at the top provides a natural mapping for Western cultures, since they read time from left to right.
Practice Words
When I first downloaded the app, I chose to learn Chinese. In this view, I saw three navigational tabs at the bottom: Search, Messages, and Schedule. You can easily change which language to learn in the filters, so I decided to look at French tutors next. In doing so, Preply added a fourth feature: Practice.
Tapping on this button brought me to a Words page, of which I had 0. This also didn’t match my conceptual model; I expected Words to be resources that I could add, provided by the app. Especially confusing was pressing the “+” icon to add a word. While the signifier clearly communicated an add action, the affordance (the only available input) was manual text entry. This places heavy reliance on knowledge in the head, which can be problematic in a language-learning context, where users may not yet know the words they are expected to enter.
Instead, the app could provide knowledge in the world through suggested words, a dictionary search, or a shuffle feature to support discovery (putting knowledge into the world). Renaming “Words” to “My Words” would also better signal that the list is user-generated, helping set expectations for an initially empty state.
Tapping on Collections brings me to a catalogue of words. But it confused me further because all the words were in English when I selected French. This is a language inconsistency and mapping failure that didn’t match my conceptual model. Why doesn’t the feature appear for learning Mandarin, if it didn’t show me any French words to learn? The practice feature isn’t universally discoverable, yet its appearance and disappearance seem unnecessarily inconsistent.
A solution would be creating an empty state for Practice when a language is unsupported, while keeping core navigation consistent (including all four features: Search, Messages, Schedule, and Practice).
Concluding Thoughts
Preply excels at visceral processing with clean visuals, delightful micro-interactions, and playful branding. At the reflective level, strong tutor experiences—the app’s core value proposition—shape users’ overall perception of the product. These positive outcomes can help reduce annoyances caused by minor interface friction at the behavioural level of processing, such as in the Practice feature. Overall, user satisfaction for this app is high, as reflected in its 4.8 App Store rating (Preply, 2026).