How To Make Quick Work of Customizing Your Quiz Question Feedback Messages

Assessments are a big part of many e-learning courses—so you definitely want to get them right. Fortunately, in Articulate Storyline, it’s a snap to to give your learners customized feedback that’s appropriate for their responses.

Anytime you create a quiz question, Storyline gives you default feedback for correct and incorrect answers. Most of the time these defaults work just fine. But when they don’t, it super quick and easy to change them.

One way to adjust the default feedback for individual questions is to simply edit the existing text. But what if you have a lot of questions, or need to change the feedback after the questions are created? Changing each one individually would be tedious and time-consuming.

Luckily, you can use Storyline’s text labels to make quick work of all this. Just hop into Player Properties to change the existing text for the correct and incorrect messages. Then, any future questions automatically include your custom feedback messages. Plus, Player Properties will instantly update all your existing questions that use the default feedback messages. That’s a big time-saver!

Customize the Default Feedback Messages

To customize your default question feedback messages,click the Home tab on the Storyline ribbon, and then click Player. Then, in the Player Properties window, click Text Labels and scroll down to find the question feedback messages.

To change the correct answer feedback, click in the Custom Text column next to the You are correct message (row 101). To change the incorrect answer feedback, look for the That is incorrect message (row 91).

If you’re changing these two messages, you might also want to consider rewording other quiz-related feedback messages, including:

• Invalid Answer Text (row 17)
• Maximum Attempts Text (row 25)
• Try Again Feedback Text (row 95)

Your customizations are automatically saved as a part of your course player—which you can save for use in other courses, too. You can even share them with other developers, saving them time. (They’ll love you for that!)

Saving Your Custom Feedback Messages

To save your custom labels, click the Save button to the right of the Language selector, enter a name, and click Save. This will save your custom labels in Storyline’s default location, which you can access through the custom section of the Language dropdown menu.

Now, if you decide to save your labels anywhere other than this default location, that’s OK—but they won’t show up as an option in the Language drop-down for other courses. In that case, you will need to load them manually by clicking the Load button, then browsing to your saved file location.

Switching to a Customized Set of Text Labels

If you want to switch to a previously saved set of text labels (including your custom feedback), find the Language selector on the Player Properties window to choose the set of text labels you want to use. The Custom section of the list contains text labels you've created and saved.

With these steps, you’ll be able to create custom feedback text for learners that responds specifically to the answers they give. When you’re ready to try customizing the default visual aspects of your question feedback, be sure to look at this tutorial on using Storyline's Feedback Masters.

While the default feedback text in Storyline works for most people most of the time, these quick and easy steps will help you customize your quiz feedback so it’s on target every time.

Post by Mike Taylor

If you want to try this yourself but don’t have Studio ’13, no problem. Just sign up for a fully functional, free trial. And don’t forget to post your questions and comments in the forums! We’re here to help. For more e-learning tips, examples, and downloads, follow us on Twitter.