How to Choose the Right LMS: An Instructional Designers’ Guide

May 28, 2024 | Articles, Digital Transformation, Instructional Design

Learning management systems (LMS) have become essential for businesses, whether they’re looking to onboard or train employees, educate customers, or just stay compliant with the latest industry regulations. With so many options on the market, it can be overwhelming to choose the right learning solution for your organization.

This article delves into nine important considerations for instructional designers and learning leaders who are in the process of choosing an LMS.  We hope that these LMS buying tips can help your L&D team  make a well-informed decision about which learning solution best meets your organization’s training and business needs.

9 Criteria for Choosing an LMS

As instructional designers and learning professionals, choosing an LMS that makes learning easy for users, easy for managers to measure, and easy for leaders to integrate into existing tech stacks. Use these 9 features to evaluate whether the LMS you’re considering meets all of your organization’s learning and businessneeds:

LMS Must-Have #1: Intuitive Interface and Ease of Use

The more usable your LMS is, the higher your training participation and completion rates will be. Make sure your LMS offers mobile access, offline learning, and accessibility features so that everyone in your organization can easily login and learn.

A critical consideration in the selection of an LMS is how easy it is for admins and learners to use.

If admins can’t easily use your LMS, training will become a point of friction that takes up valuable time and resources.

If employees struggle to use your LMS, none of the other features we’ve listed so far will matter. Lack of learner engagement means lackluster course completion metrics, which means you’ll have little to show for your investment in an LMS. In short, your leadership team likely won’t be impressed with an LMS that no one in the organization is using!

To avoid investing in a clunky, outdated, or unusable LMS, opt for a platform with an intuitive user interface, straightforward navigation, and search capabilities. Make sure that the LMS you choose offers offline learning functionality and is accessible across devices, to facilitate learning on-the-go.

Support learners with disabilities by ensuring that your LMS is equipped with accessibility features such as closed captioning, screen readers, and keyboard-only navigation.

Here are some specific things to look for when evaluating whether an LMS is easy to use:

  • Intuitive user interface: Your LMS should be easy to navigate, with a clear and consistent design.
  • Search functionality: Your LMS should feature robust functionality to facilitate the swift retrieval of necessary information.
  • Mobile access: Your LMS should be accessible across devices, enabling employees to learn on the move.
  • Offline access: Your LMS should offer learners the ability to access course modules offline.
  • Accessibility features: To meet the needs of learners with disabilities, make sure your LMS offers accessibility features that meet WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 standards. Features for accessibility include closed captioning capabilities and screen reader support.

LMS Must-Have #2: Integrations, APIs, and Single Sign-On (SSO) Features

Look for integrations, APIs, and single sign-on (SSO) features that can help your organization consolidate operations and reduce manual effort.

A learning management system (LMS) can be the key to consolidating your training into a single, easily accessible platform.

For a more cohesive learning environment with an improved learner experience and a streamlined administrative process, opt for an LMS with robust integration options and single sign-on (SSO) capabilities. This can help create a more seamless learning experience across the enterprise by reducing the need for manual data entry, multiple sign-ins, or other context switching that can lead to confusion and unnecessary complexity.

If you’re looking for an LMS that fits well within your existing tech stack, look for APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and Connectors that can integrate your LMS with any HRIS (Human Resource Information Systems) or CRM (Customer Relationship Management), or any other popular business applications that your organization might use.

LMS Must-Have #3: Robust Reporting Capabilities

Consider how your LMS’s reporting tools can help your team track learning progress, identify top performers, and make more data-driven decisions.

With the right reporting features, your LMS can help you optimize your training initiatives to meet the learning and business goals of your organization. That’s why it’s essential to choose an LMS that can help your team make data-driven decisions.

Leveraging reporting and analytics helps managers identify top-performing learners and reward their achievements. This can significantly improve morale and boost employee retention, which can reduce the costs of staff turnover. Likewise, identifying skills gaps through proper reporting can save your team time and resources by giving you the information you need to upskill or reskill employees before they fall too far behind.

Here are some of the main features you should look for in your LMS’s reporting features:

  • Customizable reports: Your LMS should allow you to create and customize reports according to your specific needs. This includes selecting the data fields, filters, and visualizations that are most relevant to your organization.
  • Real-time data: Your LMS should provide real-time access to data, allowing you to view up-to-date information on learner progress, course completion rates, and other relevant metrics.
  • Data visualization: The ability to present data in a visually appealing and easy-to-understand format is crucial for LMS admins. Your LMS reporting tool should offer a variety of chart types, graphs, and dashboards to help you analyze and interpret the data effectively.
  • Automated report generation: The LMS you choose should have the capability to automate report generation and delivery. This saves time and ensures that reports are consistently generated and distributed to the relevant stakeholders.
  • Drill-down capabilities: It’s important to be able to drill down into the data to gain deeper insights. Look for an LMS that allows you to explore your organization’s training data at different levels of granularity, such as by learner, course, or time period.
  • Export and sharing options: The reporting tool within your LMS should provide options to export reports in various formats (e.g., PDF, Excel) and allow for easy sharing with stakeholders, such as managers, instructors, or administrators.

LMS Must-Have #4: Pre-Built Content Collections

Your LMS’s content authoring tool should be easy to use for everyone from novices to instructional design experts.

Being able to tailor your courses to the specific needs of your learners or organization is critical for many LMS admins. The LMS you choose should allow your team to design and customize SCORM-compliant course content seamlessly, with drag-and-drop multimedia components, intuitive editing capabilities, and a selection of pre-designed, customizable templates and themes.

Here are some of the features that you should look for in a content authoring tool:

  • Ease of use: The content authoring tool within your LMS should be user-friendly, offering drag and drop capabilities and an intuitive interface that caters to a broad range of technical expertise levels.
  • AI capabilities: Litmos AI Content Authoring tool lets admins generate new content with natural language prompts, iterate on existing content, find and embed relevant images, and more!
  • Multi-media support: An effective content authoring tool should support a variety of multi-media elements, such as images, videos, and audio files.
  • Customization capabilities: Look for an LMS content authoring tool that allows you to easily customize the branding or look and feel of your courses.
  • Pre-built customizable templates and themes: Using templates and themes can save time and effort when creating courses with a content authoring tool.

LMS Must-Have #5: Pre-Built Content Collections

Find out whether your LMS offers access to a library of off-the-shelf training content. Pre-built courses can save time and provide high-quality, up-to-date training material for your organization – sometimes at no extra cost.

Depending on the types of training you need, off-the-shelf course modules can save your team time and effort, while still providing learners with high-quality content from subject matter experts (SMEs).

A well-stocked content library can provide many benefits for your organization. It can help you to:

  • Save time and money on content creation: Pre-built content can be used as-is or customized to meet your specific needs, saving you the time and expense of developing new learning content from scratch.
  • Improve consistency and quality of learning content: Pre-built content is often crafted by seasoned instructional designers and SMEs, which means it’s more likely to be accurate and up-to-date. This can be especially important for compliance training. See if you can find an LMS that offers pre-built compliance content that reflects the latest regulatory and legal changes relevant to your industry.
  • Keep abreast of the latest trends: Relevance is important for more than compliance training. Your LMS should offer a content library that’s regularly updated with new material, so that you can keep your teams trained in the latest developments and best practices within your industry.

When choosing an LMS with a content library, there are a few things to keep in mind:

  • The size and scope of the content library: Ensure the library is diverse and broad, to meet the diverse needs of your organization.
  • The quality of the content: Ensure the material is accurate, current, and engaging.
  • The cost of the content: Compare the pricing of off-the-shelf training content, and assess whether it fits into your budget and is worth the time savings that pre-built training provides.  Be sure to factor the cost of the content into your decision.

LMS Must-Have #6: Gamification and Social Learning Features

Offering learners the opportunity to earn points, badges, or certificates – and to see others’ progress on a leaderboard – can encourage friendly competition and keep teams motivated to learn together.

Gamification has been a hot topic in L&D for a while now. It’s no surprise that gamification LMS features are a common requirement for anyone seeking a new learning platform. That’s because features that encourage social learning and competition have been shown to significantly boost learner motivation and engagement, with one study showing that gamification increases employee engagement by 48%.

The LMS that you choose should support gamification features that allow admins to award badges and certificates for course completions or benchmarks, as well as leaderboards that showcase high-performing learners and inspire others to excel.

Being able to award certificates is also an important consideration for any buyer interested in customer training. Certification for customer trainings can give external learners tangible evidence of their expertise in your product can foster pride and confidence that may translate into brand loyalty. And those who earn a customer training certificate may be more likely to share their accomplishment with their network, which can in turn attract even more customers to your company’s customer training.

LMS Must-Have #7: Custom Branding for External Training

If your organization wants to sell online courses to an external audience, the eCommerce and branding features are an important element of your revenue strategy.

If you want control over the visual representation of your external training, then branded dashboards and eCommerce storefronts are a must. When selecting an LMS for eCommerce, research whether you can connect to and customize popular storefronts like Shopify. Make sure you can incorporate your company logo, color scheme, and other imagery into your LMS instance. See whether your LMS offers the option to create multiple storefronts, if you plan to cater to distinct target audiences.

In addition to a customizable dashboard and storefront, make sure that your LMS offers secure checkout and complies with PCI standards to safeguard customers’ financial data.

LMS Must-Have #8: Separate Instances and Tenants

Extending your learning ecosystem to partners, vendors, customers, and other external stakeholders is a lot easier when you are able to create separate LMS instances or tenants. Make sure that your LMS gives you this option, to ensure that you can customize the external learning experience to drive revenue for your organization. Distinct LMS instances or tenants should be customizable to ensure that external training is aligned with the unique needs and objectives of your audience(s). Your LMS should give admins the option to create customized learning paths for external users, assigning relevant courses, and tracking progress separately from your company’s internal users.

The great thing about using your LMS for external training is that you can reap the benefits of customer and partner training, without disrupting the continuity of your learning ecosystem. The advantage of a centralized learning management system that can also be used to provide unique external learning experiences is that your teams can still maintain brand consistency, content quality, and measurement standards from within the LMS.

A secure learning environment is also important for maintaining the trust and confidence of your external users. Check on the data protocols and access controls of your prospective LMS to ensure that the tool complies with relevant data protection regulation, and that your admins can easily configure appropriate user permissions and restrict access to specific courses or content based on user roles.

LMS Must-Have #9: AI training features for maximum efficiency

Leaders in L&D are using AI to their advantage, launching and optimizing learning programs more quickly and efficiently than ever before.

To harness the power of AI, your LMS should include AI features such as AI chatbots, AI course creation, AI-driven learning paths, machine learning assessment analysis, and predictive analytics tools. While these tools may sound intimidating, they aren’t meant to replace what L&D does; the right AI-powered LMS should act more like a co-pilot or a really skilled personal assistant: helping lighten the administrative load on training professionals, facilitating the curation of relevant resources, and helping learners customize their own professional development and training experiences.

Litmos’ AI Assistant gives learners the power to surface key insights from their learning content, find course recommendations, and receive targeted course materials through and gives administrators actionable insights to fine-tune training efforts and track learner progress. Litmos’ AI Playlist lets learners use natural language prompts to discover relevant learning materials and save them on a playlist for later learning and tracking. Powered by Litmos’ proprietary AI infrastructure, customer data on the Learning AI Assistant is not shared outside the customer’s tenant, allowing for secure content uploading.

There are many more potential applications of AI in training and employee development than the ones we’ve listed here. As AI progresses, there will no doubt be even more innovative and pioneering uses for AI in L&D.

Aligning LMS features to instructional goals

When selecting an LMS, the primary driver should be its ability to support and enhance your specific instructional goals. It’s not enough for an LMS to have a long list of features; those features must directly map to the learning outcomes you aim to achieve. For instance, if your goal is to foster collaborative learning, an LMS with robust social learning features like forums, group projects, and peer review functionalities is a non-negotiable. If you prioritize skills-based training, the system should offer strong competency management, learning paths, and detailed analytics to track skill acquisition.

Start by defining what successful learning looks like for your organization. Whether you’re looking to reduce employee turnover, improve employee engagement, increase compliance rates, or speed up onboarding, your team will need to evaluate each potential LMS based on how its tools will help you reach those targets. This goal-oriented approach ensures you invest in a system that is not just a content repository, but a strategic tool for talent development.

Comparing LMS Vendors

With so many options available in the market, it can be overwhelming to determine which LMS is best suited for your organization’s learning needs. Use this free checklist o track and compare the LMS features your organization wants:

Click here to get your free LMS Vendor Comparison Chart. 

To help you make an informed decision, consider who your learning audience is, the types of content you want to deliver, the size and structure of your organization, the level of customization and flexibility required, as well as your organization’s budget and technical requirements. Ultimately, the right LMS will not only meet your organization’s current learning needs, but also have the potential to adapt and grow with your organization’s evolving needs.

Not every LMS is created equal. Discover why over 4,000 companies and 30 million users rely on Litmos as their all-in-one learning solution. Start your free trial today!