Top Ten Things You Need To Know About E-learning #187
Hi guys! This is my first entry to one of these challenges and I think I’m going to be a bit more practical with this one in the sense that I’ll keep it to a top ten list of things to know in Storyline 360 specifically. Hopefully this helps some of you out who aren’t super familiar with the software.
1) Anything is possible but know your limitations
You can do almost anything in Storyline 360, which means you can basically say yes to anything a client asks for, as long as they don’t ask for native iOS app functionality (something I come across a lot). However, there are limitations to what Storyline 360 can do, for example random object placement which I’ve only seen used where Javascript does all the work. What I’ve found is that most of the limitations you’ll encounter are in you, and you just don’t know how to get around them yet. I find searching for what I want to do and adding Storyline 360 in Google 8 times out of 10 brings up a thread where either a solution or a workaround has been found/created to almost every limitation I’ve encountered.
2) The order of Triggers matters
Regardless of whether a Trigger is on a Slide or a Layer, or even a Master Slide, you can find yourself staring at the same problem occuring again and again if you’ve got the Triggers in the wrong order. If, for example, you have a Glossary that uses Triggers to determine which term will show when it opens you need a Trigger that changes a variable when the user clicks the term. If you then have a Trigger that changes that Variable to false when the user goes to a new slide, because you don’t want to confuse the Glossary, you can find yourself staring at a broken Glossary if your course is Triggering the ‘Jump to ? Slide’ Trigger before the ‘Adjust Variable = Glossary1 to False when user Clicks a button’’ Trigger.
I know this is confusing so put simply, have Triggers appear in the right hand side list in the order you’d like them to occur from top to bottom.
3) Buttons don’t have to have 5 states
When adding a button to a course I always use the default Insert Button function in Storyline 360 for a base, but you don’t have to have 5 states to make a good-looking functional button, if all you want is a reaction when the user clicks it. Go ahead and create your button in Photoshop, Paint, or whatever you’re using, and then create a darker/lighter version which indicates it being clicked. Then when you add a button from the Insert Button function in Storyline 360 delete all of the states apart from Normal and Down. You know what’s next, change Normal state for the image of your button as it is with no action, and change the Down state to the active version of your button. This will give you a button that can be used like all others, but it doesn’t have 5 states you need to change around.
4) Name your slides and layers sensibly
I have to be careful about this at work but you might not need to be, you’ll understand why in a second. When you name a Slide or a Slide Layer a silly name like ‘Ultimate Layer!!’ it will show up if you Publish your course as a Word document. Why would you Publish your course as a Word document you ask? For approval by a Legal team who don’t want to work through each screen and just need a screenshot of every Slide and Layer. Save yourself from having to go through and rename a bunch of stuff in the eleventh hour, name sensibly.
5) The player is fully customisable
The default player in Storyline 360 doesn’t have to be Grey and blocky, it can be fun and match the colour scheme of your course, or not exist at all! In the Player settings there is an option for changing colours, and an advanced option for changing colours. Using the advanced option allows you to change the colour of literally every part of the Player, meaning it will disappear if you change it all to white. I like to change everything to white but keep the link text and icons in my client’s core colour because it looks crisp and clear. Sadly they only think you can’t change is the size of the text, Next and Previous for example, but you can change the font of this text to enlarge it a little at least.
6) Use states over layers
This could be totally wrong but it’s worked for me so here it is. If you create a course with a load of layers, this might be due to a Glossary, References, or some crazy functionality the client has asked for, then it will be very slow. You need to include Triggers to show and hide all of these layers, maybe even animations to make them look nice and not have stuff jumping on and off of the screen, all of which is a lot of functionality for Storyline 360 to handle. Of course changing states also requires a lot of Triggers in order to do what you need to do, but for some reason it’s faster than using the Layer equivalent. It might mean that you have to be a bit more creative with how the Triggers do what you want them to, but your course will be faster for it, in my experience anyway.
7) Don’t use the same interactions over and over again
This is more something that I dislike but I also think users respond better if they have to think about what they’re doing. If they have to do the same thing 5 times in a row, even if it’s a different question each time, they’re less likely to take the information in. You can create loads of cool interactions in Storyline 360, none of which have to be the default ones found in the software. Keep an eye on E-learning Heroes for awesome examples of how to display information or have the user interact with information. I have to do a lot of the same stuff because my clients like boring and simple, but when I can I go crazy with new interactions and functionality because it raises a course that much higher in the eyes of the user.
8) Master slides are your friend
When it comes to creating a course that needs a Glossary, Menu, and who knows what other reference point on every screen, you don’t want to create a Layer on every Slide for each of them. The best thing to do is create a Master Slide which has the Menu, Glossary, and that crazy thing on their own Layers which you call from a Hotspot over an icon. This means all of those things are accessible from the Slides using the Master Slide as long as you don’t put anything over the icons. I know what you’re saying, all of my courses have screens with different backgrounds and no consistent header. I would then find a way that you can put the Menu, Glossary, and crazy think on the Master Slide and access them from each slide through a hole in the background. You could do this by changing the colour of the Master Slide background to match that of each slide. Even if you have to create five Master Slides, each with a Glossary, Menu, and third crazy item, for five different types of Slide in a course, it’s better than having those three Layers on every Slide in the course.
9) Everything about the player is optional
You can turn everything off in the Player settings in Storyline 360. If you want to turn off the Next and Previous buttons you can select every slide and untick the Next and Previous buttons from the bottom Right window in the program. The only reasons you’d do this is if you’re relying solely on the Swipe functionality, or if you’re creating your own buttons. Personally I think creating your own buttons and Menus is the way to go, you have total control over where they are and how they look, not to mention how they work. I don’t normally do the same with the Next and Previous buttons but the fact that you can is important because you may one day have a client who hates the defaults, or insists on you using the ones they painstakingly designed.
10) Talk to someone, anyone, about that function your stuck on
It can be tough creating a function no one else seems to have done before in Storyline 360. Even if they have they might not have done exactly what you need, meaning you’ve got to fill in the gaps of the solution you want. I’ve spent two days trying to figure stuff out, and when it came down to telling my boss that it wasn’t possible and why we needed to go back to the client to tell them that function has to change and go through 2 months of approval again, I thought of the answer within 2 minutes. It’s the most annoying thing in the world, but you can stare, research, and think all you want, but all you really need in a lot of cases is to talk to someone about the problem for your brain to click and say ‘hey wait! This is the solution we’ve been looking for!’ It doesn’t help when that person says the simplest idea in response to you saying it doesn’t work and then it works right before their jammy eyes, so literally try everything in order to be confident when you show them how their idea doesn’t work if it comes to that.
