One of the great things about the E-learning Heroes community is all the awesome ideas and contributions that are generated there every day. If you aren't dropping by on a regular basis, you’re missing some really great stuff like this awesome slider interaction by Richard Calcutt.

When someone else recently wanted to use a slider interaction to track their user’s responses, we were able to simply expand upon the great head start that Richard gave us and quickly come up with a solution.

Watch this screencast to see how you can use a slider interaction for user input and also track their responses in your LMS.

Published Demo | Source file

Creating the Slider Interaction:

If you’re interested in learning how to create slider interface element you can find the steps along with a sample file that Richard Calcutt has shared here.

Tracking the User Responses:

There are a couple of ways you can translate the user responses from the slider to one of Articulate Storyline's built in question or survey types. In this case, I chose to use a freeform Pick One question type.

Setup the Freeform Pick One Question

1. Add 5 shapes as the possible answers to the Pick One question that match the possible selections available on the slider. Move them so they are off the slide.

2. Convert this slide to a freeform Pick One interaction using the 5 off-screen shapes as the possible selections. (Since we aren’t worried about an actual correct answer you can mark any one of them as correct. )

3. Turn off the option to provide feedback.

Transfer the Slider Selection to the Freeform Question

Since the slider works by simply displaying one of the five states corresponding to the selection that is made. If the state of the slider is “1” we want the first freeform answer to be selected. If the state of the slider is “2”, the second freeform answer should be selected and so on.

We can use some simple triggers to automatically select the appropriate corresponding Pick One answer. For example, this is the trigger for selecting the Pick One Answer "1-Poor" when the state of the slider object is set to "1". Each of the five possible Pick One answers will have a similar trigger. 

Trigger for freeform answer 1:

Now just include this slide in your Results slide and the user selections made with the slider interaction will be recorded in your LMS.

How could you use a slider interaction? Jump on over to the community to share your ideas, or just take a look around and see what other great things are percolating over there today.

7 Comments
Mike Taylor

Sorry..Not sure what's up with the link. Here is the gist of it from Richard's post: Here's what it does: http://s3.amazonaws.com/tempshare-stage.storyline.articulate.com/stp180no63a116tp17jcs6f1ej4doe4/story.html So it works like this: 1) Each stop on the slider is now a whole new image, i.e. the bar and the circle. 2) Each image is a different state. 3) There's an invisible large box over each stop on the slider, and a smaller box on top of those that the user can drag. 4) As the small box is dragged over any of the larger boxes, it changes the state of the slider image to show the associated position. The storyline file is here: http://community.articulate.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Components.Avatars/Simplified-Slider.story , so it's probably easier j... Expand

Nathan Rightmer