Large organizations have hundreds and thousands of employees across tens of cities who are always on the move. Though there was always a need to use digital training for such a deskless workforce, most companies still persisted with doing it through instructor led programs.
However, the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the need to move to a mobile-first training paradigm. If mobile-friendly training was an additional training option a year ago, it has become a necessity today.
The good news is that employees, especially from the Gen-Z generation, have grown up using mobile devices and are comfortable consuming content on-the-go. So younger employees need a minimal learning curve in adapting to mobile based learning.
While many organizations are still in the hunt for a mobile-friendly training solution, organizations with the right training tech have transitioned their employee training programs to become mobile-ready with a click-of-a-button.
In fact, by using our mobile-friendly LMS, one of our clients saw their 7000+ field workforce spread out across 20 regions consume 4.2x more training programs on mobile devices during Covid lockdown in 2020 (source).
In this post, we give you five tips that make your training programs mobile-friendly.
We might use mobile phones of different makes and sizes, but one thing common among us is that we use our phones with one hand most of the time.
Here's a touch map that indicates the areas that are easily accessible to our thumb fingers.
However, when consuming long-form content, we generally hold our phones vertically (portrait) in one hand, leaving the other to tap.
Here's a touch map that indicates accessible areas to tap and click when the phone is held on one hand vertically, leaving the other hand to interact with the screen.
The way you expect learners to interact with the content determines your course orientation, i.e., portrait or landscape.
Here's what you can do:
Additional tips
To make your learners familiar with your learning app, offer a quick guided tour at the beginning of the course; or pop-up hints along the path to guide them.
Guiding your learners will help them click or tap in the right sections until they become familiar with your learning app's nuances.
Another feature you should offer is a progress bar at the top or bottom of the screen. This indicates the total length of the course, the current progress, and the approximate time left in the course.
Interactive content on the internet today (Tik Tok, Instagram, Facebook) is short. Constant consumption of byte-sized content on mobile devices has drastically minimized our ability to concentrate beyond a minute or two.
The Nielsen survey conducted in multiple countries indicates that an average session on mobile devices lasts as little as 72 seconds.(Source)
The takeaway here is that lengthy courses go against mobile learning habits.
It's better to design courses in short modules so that your employees can complete courses and get certified in quick time. Doing so motivates them to sign up for more courses and make learning a habit.
When interactive elements such as buttons are too small, users end up clicking the wrong parts.
Make sure you leave enough space around buttons and that they're big enough to tap or click easily.
Though hyperlinks fit well with eLearning courses for desktops, they are not native to the mobile user experience. And users might unintentionally tap on a link when swiping between pages.
Instead make hyperlinked content part of your pre-course exercise. Doing so allows learners to focus on consuming the hyperlinked content beforehand and come better prepared before taking the course.
eLearning courses made for desktops and mobile devices are two different products. Even if your desktop content adapts to the screen size, it may not look good on your smartphone.
You can't solve this problem just by scaling pictures and fonts because mobile-first content is designed right from the start based on different principles.
Putting more pressure on small training teams doesn't help the situation either.
You need the right training tech to deliver world-class mobile-friendly training on tight timelines.
That's why we built Nittio Learn LMS to enable small training teams to create mobile-friendly training programs from scratch in hours, not days or weeks.
Here's what you can do with our LMS
Our LMS can do so much more; visit www.nittiolearn.com to learn more.
Perform a Google search for the term "LMS is dead" and a cursory glance at the results will give you an idea of what I am talking about. I discuss why organisations continue to hold on to an obviously underwhelming technology and how can be easily changed.
Companies like yours invest a lot of time and money in technology and human resources to train their employees.
Are you consciously choosing the training mode for each of the training that you are doing? There are many choices of training modes available, so how do you decide what is best suited?
