How Focus Mode Benefits Learners

By: Rachel Kolman December 22, 2022
Filed Under:

It can be hard to hold the attention of learners. Absorbing new information is mentally taxing, even if the content is interesting. Classroom-based instructors have techniques to reengage a class when they sense they are losing their audience, but online education doesn’t receive the same benefit.

Additionally, online learners typically face more distractions. Not only are they typically learning at home, where families and personal interests are vying for attention, but the entire rest of the internet is a browser tab away. Distractions often tend to snowball until the afternoon is gone before we know it.

This experience can be exhausting and demoralizing. It can slow progress, impede retention, and may eventually cause learners to quit the course. In particular, on-screen distractions can add to memory burden, create confusion, and break concentration. 

Fortunately, there’s a way to help learners focus on what they need to know to mitigate all of the above problems. 

Focus Mode Can Help

LearnDash comes with a feature that is unique among industry LMSs: Focus Mode. Focus mode eliminates common webpage distractions and puts forth the most important content front and center to help learners progress through the course. Instructors can apply this setting from the back end of a course so that on certain pages or in certain lessons, unnecessary sidebars and navigation become hidden. 

Here are some of the features of Focus Mode and why they’ll help your learners: 

Main navigation, sidebars, and footers are all removed from the screen.

Generally speaking, removing navigation is a dangerous move for usability purposes. Navigation typicallys helps users from feeling lost. But navigation menus, sidebars, and footers are also the primary culprits when it comes to cluttered and distracting layouts.

The purpose of Focus Mode is to help learners stay in place, not to offer them easy exit points. By clearing away navigation, we’re creating a dedicated study space for learners so they remain on the page until they complete the lesson. 

Course navigation remains in place, but can be collapsed.

That said, there is some necessary navigation that must remain. Focus Mode keeps the course navigation so learners can easily move through each lesson and still have access to the materials they need.

If the course navigation becomes too distracting, learners can collapse the navigation to the side and expand it again later when they need to move to a different page.

Focus Mode menu allows learners to return to the main course at any time.

While in Focus Mode, learners should never feel trapped. Focus Mode can be exited at any time it’s not helping the learner succeed for some reason. This means that full site-wide choices are not removed, by merely only a click away. 

Learners can access the Focus Mode menu by hovering over their profile image. The menu items that appear can be customized to add as many items you feel will benefit your learners.

CTA buttons are paired down to “Complete” and “Next Lesson.”

An abundance of calls-to-action (CTAs) can be a terrible distraction. The purpose of a CTA is to try to convince a user to take action. They’re designed to be bold, enticing, and to get users to click away to somewhere else – which is what we don’t want. 

Because of this, we’ve reduced the number of on-screen CTAs to just two: “Complete” and “Next Lesson.” This keeps the learner focused on moving forward through the course rather than leaving the lesson to go make a post in the community forum, read a blog, or watch a video.

Progress bar remains in place.

Far from being a distraction, the progress bar is a subtle motivation to learners, as well as a visual feedback mechanism that helps them know how far they have to go in the course. It’s a perfect feature to show prominently in Focus Mode. 

In fact, the lack of a progress bar can be a distraction for many learners, because it makes them feel lost. Seeing that they’re making progress helps keep them on track and motivates them to hit the next mig milestone before ending the session.

Here’s how all the activated features of Focus Mode will look for your learners: navigation, progress bar, simple CTAs, and an easy exit: 

focus mode

Set Focus Mode in LearnDash

In LearnDash settings, go to “General” and toggle on Focus Mode. From there, you can adjust the content width and sidebar position of Focus Mode. Click “Save” and test how your Focus Mode will look to learners on their end. 

For a walkthrough of how to implement Focus Mode in less than a minute, check out our video:

Do More With LearnDash

Removing visual clutter on the screen may seem like a small step, but it has a big impact on how learners feel when they are in your course. It puts the learner in the right frame of mind while they work through the course. Learners are not only less distracted, they also are feel less exhausted because they won’t have spent so much energy maintaining their concentration.

If you aren’t a LearnDash user yet, explore how Focus Mode works in the LearnDash demo.

Rachel Kolman

Rachel Kolman has over 10 years of experience writing and editing for a variety of clients and brands. She is passionate about education, social change, pop culture, and video games. She lives in Seattle, WA with her husband and two cats.