The Docebo Discovery Lab: The Next Era of Mobile Learning

• 5 min read

Companies invest a lot in branding and image. It makes sense, considering consistency is key to providing each and every customer, both new and old, with the same experience – time and time again – to keep them coming back for more. 

But how do you ensure brand consistency within your learning experience, especially with more and more learners turning to mobile devices?

While the look and feel of today’s learning platforms can be modified to match the efforts put into branding, this has generally been for desktop environments. On the other hand, the flexibility afforded to L&D pros to configure their mobile learning experience has been limited to mobile apps listed under the name of the learning technology provider, where you can only change a few items, such as the logo, images, and colors.  

Downloading the app requires the learner to seek out their solution provider’s app in their Apple or Google Play store, download it from a company they might be unfamiliar with, then insert their learning platform’s URL to enable learning on the go.

The other option in all of this is to develop a native app involving third-party developers, complicated integration requirements and costs that could extend into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

Not an ideal scenario. 

It goes without saying that a branded mobile app is an opportunity to maximize brand identity while elevating the seamless approach to learning that mobile apps are designed to enable. 

The concept of a learning technology company allowing organizations to completely brand, name and publish their own apps for their learners (with implementation support) using the learning platform as a foundation has, so far, been uncharted territory. 

But these scenarios were all considerations Docebo wanted to solve when it started developing its Mobile App Publisher, which was released in June 2019. So far, it has helped a number of clients create seamless mobile learning experiences, branded as their own, without the headaches of external developers, soaring costs and lengthy development times. 

We sat down with Damiano Colombo, Docebo’s Product Owner for Mobile Accessibility, to discuss the new opportunity available for companies to truly make mobile learning their own with Docebo’s Mobile App Publisher. 

Can you give us an overview of Docebo’s new mobile app publisher and how it helps mobile learning efforts?

My team develops Docebo’s mobile application, Go.Learn, so we are 100% focused on the mobile app and, more recently, the Mobile App Publisher. This will allow all of our customers to build a branded version of the Go.Learn app that they can publish as their own in both the Apple App Store or Google Play Store.

It will have their own branding, with their own name, and all images are under their control. They become the owner of the app – we provide them with the platform. This way, they don’t have to use the Docebo app and supplant their branding – it fully appears to learners as their own app.

Companies can redesign the look and feel of their mobile app, without coding skills required or leaning on the support of multiple departments to bring it to life, while using Go.Learn app as the structure. 

But this isn’t the most difficult part many companies face in the process of publishing an app in the app stores because it’s not as easy as you think. 

There are a lot of very technical things that need to be carried out and, most of the time, a company that gets an app built doesn’t have the technical knowledge or resources to manage it on their own. So, they turn to external companies to accomplish this. But with what we offer, our solution is like having the key in your hands.

Just to give you an idea, there are some limitations with the app store that say a third-party provider isn’t allowed to publish on behalf of someone else. So for example, if a customer goes to a developer and asks for an iPhone app, the publication has to be carried out by the company that creates/builds it.  

In the case of our Mobile App Publisher, a company’s L&D team will work with Docebo’s professional services team to customize their mobile learning app and then goes through the release process with the help of Docebo to correctly publish the app in the app stores.

With new projects, such as the Mobile App Publisher, where do the ideas for these come from?

 Basically, our guru is our CEO, Claudio. Every time that I talk with a customer, for some reason, it was already something he had told me about. He’s really able to understand in advance, what the needs of our customers are. Also, talking with customers at our user conference, and hearing that they have particular needs and goals they want to accomplish. So by talking with Claudio and our customers, we are able to not just focus on features but, instead, the benefits we can bring to their use cases.

What do you see is the big difference with Docebo’s mobile experience? What do you and your team really try to achieve when you are building this?

The use cases of the mobile app are always very different from the desktop one. Our main focus is always to remember that users can also be offline when using mobile devices. So, the main thing that has come from this realization is the offline capability of the mobile app. You can download learning content from the platform and have it available to watch later. 

Another aspect is that mobile device users are used to seeing patterns that are very typical of the mobile experience. So while designing new features with the UX team, we always keep in mind that ‘okay, it is important to be consistent with the rest of the platform, but the most important thing is the experience for the customers.’ The documentation is important and it is always easy to follow but basically, we would like to produce an application which does not require you to read the documentation at all because it is so intuitive. You never ever read the documentation for WhatsApp or Facebook, so that’s what we want to achieve. 

Innovation is at the heart of everything Docebo does. The Docebo Discovery Lab explores the technology (and the people) behind the projects guiding us into the next generation of learning technology.

Want to learn more about Docebo’s Mobile App Publisher?