Change State of Button When (Hitting Previous/Back) Going Back Through a Course

Feb 02, 2017

I have "Next" and "Previous" buttons within my Articulate Storyline 2 course. I have the "Next" button disabled until the user completes what is asked of them; click a hotspot or type something in and, hit "Enter"/Tab".

When I go back through the course from end to start clicking the "Previous" button, the "Next" buttons are still disabled although the user has already completed the action asked of them. 

How can I get these buttons to be "Normal" once the user has already gone through those slide(s). 

11 Replies
Daniel Sposato (Philly)

Did you try setting your slide properties to "Resume saved state" under the "When revisiting" option? By default it is set to "Automatically decide" Switching this should prevent a slide from resetting itself.

If not you can use a variable to make the side remember that it has been visited.

And you can get to this by clicking the small cog icon next to the base layer name.

Anna Taylor

I did that. I just cant figure out how to set a trigger for my next button to go from being disabled, back to being normal once a user has already clicked the hotspot to move forward, and is going back through the course.

I have a trigger for the disabled button to be changed back to normal once they click the hotspot... but once they move forward, and try to go back to the slide, the "Next" button is back to being disabled.

Kirsti Harris

Hi Anna. I looked at your file, and Daniel's advice about changing the slide properties only partially solved the problem for me; I think you're running into problems at least in part because you've used hotspot quiz question templates for your slides. When I went back to some slides, sometimes the built-in next/previous buttons showed up, which further complicated the trigger issues.

I have a different suggestion for how to program what you want. You can use a clear button instead of a hotspot as your way of recognizing that the user has clicked... and then you can use the built in next & previous buttons, but add a condition on the next button.  Basically you only allow 'next' to work if the (clear) button is selected.  Your user won't get the feedback slides if they click the wrong place, but hopefully that doesn't matter.

You'll still need the slide properties to be set to "resume saved state"... but otherwise things should work ok.

I made a small sample file with only one slide done this way; I made the slide from 'scratch' and so the image isn't as good quality as what you were using (it's a screenshot of yours LOL). Just for fun I added flashy arrows to guide the user to the right place to click.

Hope this helps.

Kirsti Harris

Hi again Anna. Daniel's solution is awesome if you want to continue to use custom prev/next buttons. If you want to make the built-in ones work for you though, I've tweaked my file from earlier slightly to do two additional things - first, you're right that I missed the part about clicking making the slide advance.  The fix for that was to add a second trigger on my transparent button. Now, as soon as the user clicks "getting started", first 'button 1' gets 'selected', and then the slide advances. The second thing I did this time was to allow for the timing option that you also have on many of your slides.  So after 7 seconds 'button 1' changes to 'selected' automatically (rather than by the user clicking). This change of state doesn't advance the slide, but does meet the "if" criteria for the 'next' button to work. 

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