Designing Learning For Mobile Devices
When designing mobile learning the amount of space you have to display learning content and add interactivity is limited. When designing eLearning for mobile devices this can be challenging and it is important to ensure that your content is both mobile friendly and still delivers the key content your learners need.
Here are some techniques that can help you design and develop mobile learning effectively.
1. Progressive Disclosure
When designing pages for your eLearning there is often the temptation to display a lot of information on screen at once using bullets, sentences or paragraphs, this is fine when viewing eLearning on a PC but can be an issue when being viewed smaller mobile screens. Progressive disclosure involves only showing information or actions when the user needs it, this might be having bullets fade in an out one at a time or only showing buttons at certain points. By doing this it will increase the amount of screen space you have and not overload the user interface with content.
2. Animate Gestures
When developing eLearning for mobile devices it should be intuitive, this means that learners should naturally be able to figure out what to press next, when taking eLearning on a PC or laptop we can place instructional text on-screen, however for mobile devices we may not have this luxury of space. Having animated gestures is one way to get around this, instead of having instructions on screen all the time the learner can first try to progress, if they press the wrong thing an animated popup can be used to instruct the user what to do next, in other words instructions only appear if they are needed.
3. Full-screen Experience
Making the most of the screen size for mobile learning is critical, as you have a limited amount of screen size it is important your assets can be stretched and manipulated in ways that let you maximise what you put on screen. Make sure you are using high quality images and videos when developing your next mobile learning course.
