Gomo feature updates: 16 great improvements made in the last year

2021 saw Gomo go from strength to strength, adding features big and small that make it easier than ever to create great learning content. In this blog post, we’ve highlighted some great new features, fixes, and other updates that you may have missed, all to help you get the most out of your favorite eLearning authoring tool.

Theme and asset additions

Say hello to our beautiful new core theme, Vinte!

Gomo’s new Vinte theme provides another great option for styling eLearning content with a modern twist. It also introduces some new navigation elements, setting it apart from some of our existing themes. This includes:

• A new, easy-to-use side menu for mobile that consolidates top and bottom navigation items
• Automatic merging of navigation with the table of contents menu (if the latter is used)

Take advantage of our new tabbed content asset

We’ve added a new tabbed content asset—visible on the right-hand side of the screenshot above. This offers you another visually interesting way of ‘slicing’ and serving text to your users. As with our other core assets, it works within Gomo’s usual multilanguage capabilities, themes, and responsive design for a great user experience.

New “asset-complete” display condition

If a learner completes an asset—for example, choosing the right answer in a multiple-choice question and confirming their choice—designers now have access to a display condition that will trigger the next question or screen to be shown immediately. This “asset-complete” display condition can also be triggered at the end of a video to show text explaining the importance of the content the learner has just seen.

We’ve improved our theme-validation checks

An issue was identified where it was possible to add incorrect custom colors or font sizes in a theme. So, if for instance you provided an incorrect hexadecimal color code and saved the theme, you could experience build issues, and it wasn’t always obvious what the source of the problem was. These publish issues are now no longer a worry: we’ve built this into our validation layer and users are notified proactively if there’s an error.

The theme editor now has a persistent logo option

Wandering logos are no more! We’ve made a tweak to ensure that your logo remains in an appropriate place whether viewed via mobile or desktop.

User Experience Improvements for Your Learners

3 big accessibility improvements for Gomo courses

We’ve been working with Gomo customers to keep courses compliant with key accessibility standards. We’re committed to improving in this area, and are proud to have made some tweaks that iron out some frustrations that learners using assistive technologies may have otherwise experienced. This includes:

• Addition of ‘aria-label’ attributes to buttons. Primarily, we’ve used these labels to indicate when pop-up windows will be launched. We’ve also made sure that button states (such as ‘visited’ or ‘disabled’) are correctly reported. Assistive technologies can offer a more streamlined experienced if these labels are available.
• Clean-up of tabbing order. If you’ve ever tabbed through links on a webpage using your keyboard you may have noticed that they aren’t always served in the order you’d expect. The changes we’ve made ensure that screen readers and other devices will pick things up in an order that makes sense to all learners.
• Screen title updates. Up until summer 2021, the window title of your Gomo course would show only the name of the course you were viewing, regardless of which course screen you were viewing. We now dynamically update this window title to reflect the topic title in continuous (parallax) scroll screens, and the current topic and screen title in non-continuous topics. We’re sure you’ll agree that this change improves context for all learners.

We’ve fixed language persistence

You remember great learning experiences, so great learning should remember you! When learners select a language for a multi-language course, this information is now stored alongside their tracking data and will ensure their choice for that specific course is remembered between sessions.

We’ve made some tweaks to subscreens

Various display options have been updated so they respond better across different devices, specifically mobile. We’ve also made some updates so these assets are better recognized by assistive technologies.

Editor UI Improvements

Check out our easy-to-use help widget

We’ve added a new widget to the bottom right-hand corner of the authoring interface that allows you to quickly and easily gain access to the Gomo knowledge base, access support articles, and if necessary, reach our support team.

Improvements to custom asset separation

Gomo has a great range of core assets such as various text field options, multiple-choice questions, and more. Customers then have the ability to define their own custom assets built off of these. Managing these assets is now a lot easier after a UI tweak: rather than dumping all custom assets into a single list in the editor, they’re now separated by presentation (e.g. video), question type (e.g. multiple-choice question). Further customizations made by the author are now separated out so they’re easily recognized by the user.

Version control improvements for preview content

Gomo’s powerful collaborative tools have received a minor but hugely useful tweak. If you’re one of the many who’ve used Gomo’s ability to share work-in-progress links to other authors you may have found that there was no way to know for sure whether you were looking at the most up-to-date version of the course. We’ve now added a pop-up notification to let you know when changes have been made!

Improvements to Gomo’s back-end

Improvements to architecture and performance for a better experience

We’ve recently improved how Gomo handles asynchronous updates, solving errors that could happen when working on both course content and project or course settings at the same time, allowing you to get the most out of Gomo’s collaboration tools.

While making these improvements, the Gomo team was also able to improve save speed, reducing the amount of time it takes to save projects.

Keeping your data safe and maintaining Gomo security

The Gomo team performs internal and external penetration testing of Gomo’s systems every year, using static and dynamic code analysis, and working with a third party to ensure testing of common exploits.

As a result of this and additional work with our internal security teams, we’ve also attained a SOC2 certification after an in-depth audit. Alongside Gomo’s existing Cyber Essentials Plus certification and use of Amazon Web Services, you can rest assured that your data is in safe hands!

We’ve improved our automation of quality assurance tasks

We’ve invested in an automated test framework that allows us to test common features and functionality whenever we implement anything new, helping us avoid regressions and broken functionality, leading to improvements to Gomo’s overall stability.

Finally, a sneak-peak at what we’ve got lined up in 2022

Great news! We’re making improvements to Gomo all the time, and are happy to announce two fantastic new features you can expect in the near future:

• Instant preview: Authors will soon be able to click a button in the editor to instantly see the content as a learner would, without the need to save and wait for a full course rebuild cycle, making the process of course creation easier than ever before.
• A new delivery mechanism: We’re currently building a successor to our LMS Wrapper. Using Rustici Software technology, this new delivery option will include:
  • A new dashboard showing total number of users, allowances, and courses, as well as downloadable reports
  • Additional support for packages that use SCORM 2004 and AICC tracking standards
  • The ability to have multiple routes per course, allowing you to upload your courses to multiple LMSs, and control availability on each