Storyline 360: What Are Triggers?

Want to build interactivity into your e-learning course—things like jumping to a slide, clicking tabs to show different information, playing media, submitting a quiz answer, and more? With Storyline 360 you have an easy no-code solution to help you build the exact interactivity you want: triggers. 

Triggers tell your course what actions to perform at specific times. And what makes them so simple to work with is they’re essentially just the answers to two basic questions:

1. What action do you want to happen? 
2. When do you want it to take place?

Let’s say you want to create a Home Button that takes learners to the main menu of my course. To decide what trigger to use you need to know:

1. What action do you want to happen: The course jumps to the main menu
2. When do you want it to take place: When the user clicks the Home Button

Or maybe you want some narration to start when a slide opens. For that, you need to know:

1. What action do you want to happen: The narration audio file plays
2. When do you want it to take place: When the timeline starts on the slide

Once you have the answers to those two questions, you’re ready to create your trigger in Storyline 360!

Now that you know how they work, let’s look at just how simple it is to set up any trigger you need for your courses.

Creating a New Trigger

There are two ways to get started: click Trigger in the Insert tab or select the Create New Trigger icon in the triggers panel. Either option opens the Trigger Wizard, which will guide you through the entire trigger creation process.

When that Trigger Wizard pops up, you’ll probably notice that the first two sections in it feel pretty familiar. That’s because they’re essentially asking you the two questions we discussed earlier:

Question 1: Action

You’ve got 25 actions to choose from in Storyline 360, which means a lot of possibilities. And thankfully, they’re labeled with clear, conversational names that make it easy to browse the drop-down menu in the Trigger Wizard to find the exact action you want.

Once you’ve picked your main action, additional drop-down menus appear, which allow you to further refine what you want to happen. For example:

• if you select Jump to Slide, the next dropdown will ask you which slide you want to go to.
• if you choose Play Media, the dropdown will list the media files on the slide you can pick from.

Question 2: When

Once you’ve identified what action should take place, then it’s time to specify when you want it to happen. Again, you’ll make your choice from a straightforward drop-down list.

Just as you saw with the Action section, once you’ve picked an option from that list the Trigger Wizard will show you any additional fields you need to fill out to ensure your trigger works. This feature is a huge help for making sure important information isn’t accidentally left out.

For instance, if you choose User Presses a Key, a new field will ask you to identify which key. Or, if you select Object Dropped On, you’ll then be asked to choose one of the available objects on the slide or layer.

Conditions

There’s also an optional section in the Trigger Wizard: Conditions.

Conditions are a powerful feature for enabling actions to happen ONLY IF something else in the course has already occurred. For example, if you want your course to show a slide with remedial content only to learners who got an earlier quiz question wrong, a conditional trigger can help you do that.

The possibilities and combinations are endless when it comes to conditional interactivity! Find out more about how to work with conditions in this article.

Does Storyline 360 Build Any Triggers for Me Automatically?

Absolutely! To save you time, some Storyline 360 slides and objects have common triggers included with them by default. Here are a few places you can expect to regularly see these automatic triggers.

Previous and Next Buttons

There’s no need to set up triggers for the Previous Button and Next Button every time you add a new slide. That’s taken care of for you—automatically!

Quiz Slides

You’ll notice quiz slides have a Submit Button by default instead of a Previous and Next Button. That button has a trigger automatically attached to it that submits the interaction when it’s clicked.

Quiz Results Slides

When it comes to the Graded Results slide, the prebuilt triggers do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. They check the quiz passing score and automatically show either the Failure or Success layer based on the learner’s performance. They also give learners the option to use the Review Button to revisit the quiz slides and answers.

Of course, even though all the triggers listed here are prebuilt for you, you can always edit or delete them to customize your course as needed.

Wrap-Up

As you can see, triggers are as powerful as they are easy to use, making creating a wide variety of interactivity in Storyline 360 a snap. Looking for even more ways to work with triggers effectively? Give these articles a try:

• Storyline 360: Working with Triggers
• 4 Things You’ll Want to Know About the Triggers Panel in Storyline 360

Want to try something you learned here, but don’t have Articulate 360? Start a free 30-day trial, and come back to E-Learning Heroes regularly for more helpful advice on everything related to e-learning. If you have any questions, please share them in the comments.