According to a Pew Study on the mobile landscape, 57 percent of the U.S. population owns a smartphone and uses it extensively. More specifically, 8 percent of a person’s day is spent looking at a mobile screen. That said, the rush for organizations to provide their learning content on mobile devices is no surprise. Organizations that do not adapt and transition to a mobile landscape will be left behind.
When the topic of mobile delivery comes up, it is often associated to the organization or the learning function that needs to change. There’s rarely specific talk of the one group that is affected likely the most – those who are initially developing the content.
For most of their careers, designers lose sleep over the style of the presentation, making generic and boring ones look interesting and engaging. Now the idea of transferring the presentation to a mobile screen is a whole new ball game.
It’s no wonder only 12 percent of learning content is mobile-enabled.
Changing the way you have always done business can be a rough transition, so here are a few simple considerations for those in the trenches. These four tactical considerations for mobile design and delivery can provide your designers a sigh of relief.
1) Bite-size is the right size
The more concise you can be, the better the content will translate into mobile. When you we write content, you want to be able to create concise objects and content that can stand alone. This isn’t just a mobile specific piece of advice either. All content should be able to stand on its own because small chunks of content allow for reuse. That is just smart development!
2) Invest wisely
From a tactical consideration standpoint, do you really want to make a large dollar and time investment in creating a cool Java script widget when you could achieve the same learning outcome using something less elaborate? Absolutely. From a budgetary standpoint, you don’t want to spend a whole lot of money building something when it’s unnecessary to do so. Your management team and bottom line will appreciate it.
3) Templates
Consider using a template. Templates give you two things:
- Consistency: Whenever you create content in this template going forward, it will be delivered in a similar way every time.
- Efficiency: Designers create the content and with the press of a single button, it’s delivered to your desired output.
4) Be selective
Identify the specific pieces of the course that will need to be delivered to mobile.
Think of it this way, you have a web course and it contains a large amount of content. Although it may be easiest, you don’t want to take that whole page of content and render it onto mobile because it’s no longer concise or mobile friendly.
One final thought to consider any time you are designing for mobile is what can you do to deliver the same amount of information in a smaller, more easily consumable chunk?
The reality is, mobile content tends to be a subset of the content you already have versus another entity.
Sarah Danzl is the marketing communications manager at Xyleme, Inc.
