Blog Post

Articles
4 MIN READ

Save Development Time and Storyboard Directly in Storyline 360

NicoleLegault1's avatar
NicoleLegault1
Community Member
8 years ago

Storyboarding your project is a crucial step in the e-learning development process. The storyboard is the blueprint for your course, so to speak, and will serve as a guideline when developing your final course materials. The storyboard includes information such as:

  • Screen or Slide ID
  • Text content
  • Images
  • Navigation instructions
  • Animation details

The specific information you choose to include in your storyboard depends on the specifics of your project, as well as who’s involved in it. If you’re acting as an instructional designer only, and passing on your storyboard to a Storyline developer, you’ll want to include more information and detailed notes than if you’ll be developing the course yourself. Learn more about what’s typically included in a storyboard in the following articles:

The tool used to storyboard varies from one developer to the next; some instructional designers use a Word document with tables, others use a PowerPoint template. I want to share with you one way you can save a huge amount of time in your course development process: by storyboarding directly in Storyline. Here’s an example of a fully developed storyboard created in Articulate Storyline:

View | Download 

When you’re storyboarding directly in Storyline, you’re actually creating what some may call a prototype. A prototype is a sample you can click through and experience, which has benefits. (Want to know more? Click here to learn more about the difference between a storyboard and a prototype.) Benefits to building your storyboard or prototype in Storyline are:

  • You get a sense of course flow. When you’re looking through a storyboard that is laid out in tables in a document, it’s really hard to get a sense of how the information will flow when you actually click through it. You’ll have a much more “learner-like” experience if you create your storyboard in Storyline and let your team click through the slides, like the learner will.
  • It’s clearer for the developer. When the content is laid out on each slide with clear instructions and notes, it’s much easier for the developer to take the storyboard and bring to life exactly what you envisioned, as opposed to working from a Word document or something less visual. You’ll have less back and forth and revisions to do when you’re content is laid out clearly from the get-go.
  • You save development time. When you build your storyboard directly in Storyline, the shell of your course is already built and most of the content is already there; all that’s left to do is the styling of your content to make it look nice.

With these benefits in mind, let me share some of the tips and tricks that went into creating this sample storyboard for my Safe Travel module.

Sort out the navigation details

In order to let the learner “click through” the storyboard, you’ll need to set up all of your hyperlinks in your prototype. This is part of what makes a storyboard in Storyline so helpful and time-saving: getting all of your navigation details and links sorted out from the beginning. You will know exactly what buttons are on each slide, and exactly where everything links.

Another tip for building out your navigation: don’t leave the Next and Prev button links to “Jump to next slide” and “Jump to previous slide.” Go through each of those and hyperlink to the actual slide you want the buttons to link to specifically.

Focus on content, not style

Your storyboard is intended to get the flow and content just right. You might decide to include images, or only image placeholders, depending on your project’s requirements. But working out the details like background specifics, font style and size, and accent colors can be done later. First and foremost, you should make sure the content is solid and accurate. Make sure it’s clear for those reviewing your storyboard that styling will come later, or they might get hung up on that.

My tip is to give everything a simple wireframed look with black and white, and a super-simple default font. This ensures the focus is on the actual slide content, not the styling or look-and-feel.

Include detailed notes

Using the Notes field to include detailed instructions or information for reviewers and developers is a great time-saving tip. The level of detail you include in your notes will vary depending on your requirements, but it’s a good idea to provide any details you can about timing and animations, navigation, specifics about images or graphics, or anything else you want the developer to know or include in the course.

The great thing is: once you’ve created your storyboard or functional prototype directly in Storyline, you can simply do a “Save as” of your .STORY file and start developing your course directly from the storyboard. This will save you tons of development time, as your images (or placeholders) and text content are already all included. Simply style your course, add multimedia, and—voila!—your course is complete! Plus, when you storyboard in Storyline, you’ll not only make the development process easier for your developers, you’ll also speed it up.

Do you have any tips of your own about storyboarding directly in Storyline? If so, please leave a comment below.

Want to try something you learned here, but don’t have Articulate software? Download a free 30-day trial, and come back to E-Learning Heroes regularly for more helpful advice on everything related to e-learning.

Published 8 years ago
Version 1.0
  • Thank you for sharing your experience using Storyline to storyboard, Nicole. We currently use Word to storyboard but are exploring other options for this activity. How do you collect feedback from subject matter experts on your Storyline storyboard?
    • KimHannan's avatar
      KimHannan
      Community Member
      We use Google Slides, and it has been a wonderful game-changer. Not everyone on the team has Storyline installed, so we can't create storyboards there. Slides is helpful for gathering feedback in the design stage.
      • HelenaSmith-805's avatar
        HelenaSmith-805
        Community Member
        OH that is interesting way to share the documents. What about SCORM cloud?
    • JonathanVerey's avatar
      JonathanVerey
      Community Member
      Hi Maureen,
      Articulate 360 has a new tool, Articulate Review, that really helps with collecting feedback from SMEs. You upload your SL project into Review, and can share a link to the project and users can add comments next to each slide in the course. Highly recommend the upgrade!
  • SylviaWright's avatar
    SylviaWright
    Community Member
    HOORAY! Thank you Nicole! I have been doing my storyboarding in SL2! Thanks for this article and these helps!
  • JonathanVerey's avatar
    JonathanVerey
    Community Member
    Thank you for sharing your prototype sample, Nicole! I really like how you've stripped down the player and use the notes section to display the additional storyboard details. I agree storyboarding in Storyline not only saves time during the development phase, but now with Articulate Review gathering feedback on the prototype is SO much easier!
  • jimtabasz's avatar
    jimtabasz
    Community Member
    Thanks Nicole!
    Very helpful, especially as deadline looms. Can I ask how you have the Notes Menu displaying on the left side? Is that a feature you set up on the Player? I think it would be helpful for my client to be able to see it there, rather than in the Notes below. Can you point me to how it is done please?
    • JonathanVerey's avatar
      JonathanVerey
      Community Member
      Hi Jim - the location of the tabs can be customized in the Player Properties > Features > Player Tabs. You can move the Notes and Menu tabs down to the Sidebar. Hope this helps!
      • jimtabasz's avatar
        jimtabasz
        Community Member
        Thanks! Its all coming back to me now….
  • I like to the idea of using Sl2 for Storyboarding but just like someone asked earlier, how would I share this with someone that doesn't have SL2. (We don't have 360 at this time, and I would much rather use Review for that purpose).
  • KiranDhot's avatar
    KiranDhot
    Community Member
    I agree with Helena. Most of the time, only the developer has licenced storyline on their computer. It would be difficult to pass it on to others who do not have access to storyline.
    • NicoleLegault1's avatar
      NicoleLegault1
      Community Member
      Hi Kiran - Yes I understand what you mean about sometimes only the developer will have the Storyline tool installed. Might you consider Powerpoint for your storyboard? Then it will still have that slide-based format that lets you click through and experience it like a learner will, almost everyone has/and knows how to use powerpoint, AND the developer can simply import your Powerpoint into their version of Storyline and start working directly from that content, saving development time.
  • Hey everyone - as mentioned by others, the best way to have your content reviewed is to upgrade to Articulate 360 and then you can upload your storyboard/prototype directly to Articulate Review and get your feedback/comments right there.

    But - for those of you who are still working in SL2 and for who that is not an option, what I used to do in the past is create a word doc with a simple table with 2 columns, the left-hand column had a screenshot of each slide/layer and the right column was for the SME to leave notes or comments. Not exactly ideal, but it worked out well. The longest part was usually taking the screenshots and creating the document with the tables and screenshots.

    Also - if the person storyboarding doesnt have access to Storyline, consider doing this exact same process in Powerpoint. Almost everyone has powerpoint and it's also slide-based so gives you the same feel, you can create your hyperklinks between slides, and you can also import your PPT directly into SL when you are ready to start developing.

    Hope this helps! :)
    • KimHannan's avatar
      KimHannan
      Community Member
      Alternative to Word, Google Docs functions much the same way, but everyone can collaborate in a single place instead of having a different file version going to each reviewer.
      • NicoleLegault1's avatar
        NicoleLegault1
        Community Member
        That's a really great tip, Kim! Might also be beneficial to let the SMEs/Reviewers see each others comments so they don't leave duplicates or conflicting comments.
  • TeriSlater's avatar
    TeriSlater
    Community Member
    Thanks for sharing this template, I have downloaded and started using. For some reason, I'm having a really hard time getting the Next button to work. I triple checked the settings, but sometimes I have to click next 2-3 times before it will advance to the next slide, or in this case go back to slide 1.2 which is the menu. This is both in preview (project) mode, and published. Do you think it's because there are multiple scenes? I don't typically divide my modules up into scenes and have not experienced this next button issue before.

    Thoughts?
    • NicoleLegault1's avatar
      NicoleLegault1
      Community Member
      Hi Teri! The reason this is happening is probably because the Menu in the Player is set to "Restricted". What happens when the menu is in this mode is that it doesn't allow a learner to click ahead to the Next slide until the timeline for the slide is completed. If you change the length of the timeline to be 1/4 or 1/2 of a second, or change your menu to be Free, you will probably fix this issue. Hope this helps!
      • jimtabasz's avatar
        jimtabasz
        Community Member
        Thanks nicole - I ran into that too, and your reply is timely!