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7 Ways to Make Your LMS Perfect for Mobile Users

Created: Jan 13, 2025

Updated: Jan 13, 2025

Accessing learning management systems (LMSs) using mobile devices has become rather popular recently. A 2024 report found that 25% of all LMS logins now occur via mobile devices, a decent increase since recent years. Having a mobile-friendly LMS responsive design is not optional; rather, it is a must because students want to access training resources on demand.

Implementing responsive design techniques allows your LMS appearance and functionality to optimize across phone, tablet and desktop screens. With this, the learners get a good experience and get supported with engagement and completion rates on all the devices. If you include mobile responsiveness in your LMS design strategy, you will maximize your training content's value.

GO-Globe has outlined seven tips to improve LMS mobile responsiveness and accessibility. These actionable steps will help you to create an LMS that meets modern learners, from flexible layouts to mobile content considerations.

 

1. Implement a Flexible Layout with Breakpoints

The basis of good mobile responsiveness is a flexible and adaptable LMS webpage layout. With CSS media queries and a fluid grid, we can use content to resize and reorganize itself to fit a device’s specific screen size. It also stops horizontal scrolling and solves the overflow problem.

The trick is to set up the right breakpoints in your CSS to force reshaping when your CSS is at a certain width. In other words, common breakpoints are 360px, 768px and 1024px widths, which are the breakpoints for viewing on the full phone, tablet, and desktop. This way, you can check that your LMS looks ok at these widths, meaning it'd be good across all devices.

For example, at 360px width, a single-column layout typically works best for easy mobile scrolling with tapped interaction. At 768px and beyond, multi-column layouts become more usable with additional screen real estate.

Implementing a flexible framework with the help of an LMS development company backed by strategic breakpoints gives your LMS the necessary structure to respond across mobile, tablet and desktop displays for optimal viewing.

2. Increase Text Size for Readability

Small text is great on large monitors but terrible and frustrating on small mobile devices. And your LMS can have bigger phone font sizes to address this issue.

Responsive type scaling applies to grow and shrink text smoothly on different displays. Instead of fixed PX size, you can use CSS relative units such as EM or REM to achieve this. In other words, content becomes readable for mobile users if we set header text to 1.8REM and body text to 1.4REM, for example, at narrow widths.

Additionally, make sure the colours between the text and background don’t clash a lot for a sharp text viewing experience. Text with white space around them is less cluttered on smaller screens.

With these mobile typography techniques, learners can comfortably view and absorb content without excessive pinching or squinting on their devices.

3. Use Tap Targets for Fingers over Mice

Mobile users use tap and touch actions instead of mouse hovers and clicks. In other words, your LMS needs to have tap targets that are big and spaced far enough so that users can easily reach them on touch devices.

The rule of thumb is that interactive elements like buttons, menu items, and form fields should be at least 40 px high and wide. The spacing between the components should be at least 8px, and the desired target should be able to activate without accidentally touching other items.

You can also use external libraries such as FastClick to remove a 300ms delay when tapping an element. The lag built into this is to differentiate between tapping and scrolling on mobile, but it’s causing responsiveness issues. It removes a snappier LMS interaction.

Mobile users can easily navigate your LMS with finger-friendly tap targets without being precise with their tapping or errors breaking their experience.

4. Compress Images for Faster Load Times

In mobile LMS, load speed is a very important factor in responsiveness because mobile connections are slower than desktops. Often, the large file sizes of high-resolution images become bottlenecks, as each image can delay page rendering.

Reduction in KBs of an image without compromising quality is a must for performant mobile load time. Techniques include:

  • Compression: Reduce KB size through tinyPNG or tinyJPG compression
  • Cropping: Remove unnecessary areas around key image subjects
  • Dimension Reduction: Resize images to the  maximum expected rendering width/height
  • Lazy Loading: Only load images visible in the user’s viewport on the scroll

According to Google PageSpeed insights applied to over 100,000 product images, these optimizations decrease mobile load speed by 55%. Faster load times prevent mobile user drop-off and improve LMS engagement.

5. Eliminate Horizontal Scrolling

Horizontal scrolling to view overflow content may seem acceptable on desktops, but it creates major mobile navigation difficulties. Users have to awkwardly tap and drag or pan manually by swiping, which can easily miss information.

Instead, test that your LMS eliminates horizontal overflow or scrolling at all responsive breakpoints. Content that may align acceptably side by side on a desktop should stack vertically on top of each other for mobiles in single-column view.

This mobile-first approach to content layout enhances scrolling comfort while preventing misclicks and missing information. Users can only progress through material smoothly from top to bottom, rather than forcing difficult horizontal navigation.

6. Use Mobile-First Content Structure

When creating LMS content, design it for mobile constraints first and then add layered elements for bigger displays. It’s mobile-first and focused on removing unnecessary bloat that might clog up small viewports.

Prioritize what content is vital for mobile viewers vs optional supplementary additions like supplementary references, expanded tables, or multimedia that’s nice to have. Hide non-critical elements under collapsible accordion menus or tabs to avoid overloading mobiles.

Secondly, concise mobile-specific descriptions can be made using short wording and sentence structure. Bulleted lists make quick mobile scanning vs lengthy paragraphs. Right-sizing information across devices allows us to show simplified content on phones while keeping detailed embellishments for desktops.

7. Provide App or Offline Accessibility

While responsive design creates an optimal web-based interface for mobile users, enabling offline LMS access through apps or cached data takes availability one step further. This allows mobile learners without consistent internet to have the reliability of learning on the go, whether during a commute or when there is no stable internet.

Native LMS apps for iOS and Android allow full functionality for mobiles to search catalogues, track progress or complete training offline, then sync results when reconnected. Alternately, caching some course data locally using HTML5 also supports availability gaps.

By enabling offline modes or mobile apps, mobile learners can keep moving along even when they’re travelling or on the move when service is interrupted. The flexibility of your LMS content is then amplified, increasing its reach and impact.

Conclusion

The rise of mobile usage continues exponentially year over year, so LMS platforms are becoming more and more responsive. Learners expect training materials to be accessible across devices, so optimizing for smaller displays through fluid layouts, readable text, tap interactions, and simplified content is no longer optional.

These seven tips will help you improve engagement with mobile LMS users and help them progress with their learning, whether on a phone, tablet or desktop. Every modern LMS should be creating a seamless experience across all devices.

By leveraging mobile-first design tactics covered here, such as faster load times, eliminating horizontal scrolling or adding offline modes, your LMS can deliver its full value - no matter how users choose to access the content. The responsive design ultimately captures more learner attention while conveying information most effectively across all platforms.

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