As an e-learning developer, you spend a lot of time mulling over ways to help lighten the cognitive load on your learners. Shouldn’t your authoring apps do the same for you? After all, an intuitive feature here, a considerate little time-saver there, and before you know it you’re more productive, have extra time for creativity, and (best of all) you’ve lowered your stress levels.
That’s why you’re going to love building interactions in Storyline 360. When you build interactivity in Storyline 360, you’ll need to use triggers. Triggers are a simple but powerful way to make things happen. For example, if you want the learner to jump to another slide when they click on a button, you’ll add a trigger.
And in Storyline 360, all of your triggers are managed in one convenient spot: the triggers panel. You can see what the triggers panel looks like below:
In this article, we’ll walk you through some of the features that make working with triggers in Storyline 360 so fast and intuitive. Here we go!
1. Build Triggers with a Wizard
The idea of creating a trigger might sound intimidating, but it’s actually super simple in Storyline 360! That’s because you create triggers with a wizard that uses plain, easy-to-follow language that makes creating triggers fast and easy. All you have to do is follow the steps.
2. Create or Edit with Your Keyboard
Who has time for mouse clicks and tedious typing? When you really want to fly through your development work, it’s nice to just click a key on your keyboard to move through the trigger wizard. And with keyboard editing in the trigger wizard, you can do just that! Create or edit triggers just by tabbing through the trigger wizard. Use the arrow keys and/or start typing to filter the dropdown lists for each field.
3. Edit Triggers Directly in the Panel
Once you’ve created a trigger, what happens if you need to change it? Nearly every part of your trigger can be edited directly in the triggers panel, without opening up the full trigger wizard. That means you can edit triggers at lightning speed!
4. Intelligent Prefills
Storyline 360 also intelligently prefills fields in the trigger wizard, meaning it remembers the last trigger you created and then uses that as the basis for creating your new trigger.
5. Edit Multiple Triggers at Once
You can also group multiple triggers together for even faster editing. This means you can quickly update the object that your triggers are tied to or the event that causes them to fire all in one fell swoop.
You can even select multiple triggers to copy, paste, move, disable, and delete in bulk.
6. Expand and Collapse Triggers
The triggers panel is great, but when you’re building a complex interaction it can get to be pretty visually overwhelming. To help with that, Storyline 360 gives you the ability to expand and collapse triggers in the panel. This helps you to zero in on the triggers associated with a specific object. Collapsing triggers makes it so much easier to focus on just what you need to see.
7. Easy Condition Authoring
If you want to trigger an action only when certain criteria are met, like all the layers on a slide being viewed, you can add a condition. Adding conditions to your triggers is also supereasy. In the trigger wizard, simply select the condition you want from the handy dropdown menu. You can also search conditions and duplicate existing conditions to save yourself some clicks.
8. Reordering and Pasting Conditions
You can change the order of conditions by dragging them up and down the list. And you can save time by copying conditions from one trigger and pasting them to another.
9. Color-Coding
Triggers are color-coded in the panel, which makes it easy to scan and see what’s going on with your interactions.
To find out what the colors mean and download a printable PDF, head over here: Storyline 360: Trigger Panel Color Coding Cheat Sheet.
10. Temporarily Disable and Enable Triggers
When you’re trying to troubleshoot an interaction, having the ability to temporarily disable triggers (without having to delete and then recreate them!) is a huge time-saver. Not only does it save you precious minutes with troubleshooting, but it also gives you more creative freedom to experiment with your designs. Hooray for more flexibility!
Wrap-Up
These are just some of the reasons why creating interactions in Storyline 360 is super easy. But there are so many more! If you want to try it out for yourself, but don’t have Articulate 360, start a free 30-day trial today. And be sure to come back to E-Learning Heroes regularly for more helpful advice on everything related to e-learning.
Published 6 years ago
Version 1.0
