Custom Next/Prev Buttons

Exactly what you described is what I was planning to do if no one in the forums had a better solution.

It would seem that storyline should know if it's at the slide of a scene.. that the NEXt slide is the first slide of the next scene.

Thanks for your reply.  So many people here were talking about custom navs.. and no one mentioned this issue.. so i thought i was just missing something... but it sounds like maybe i'm not.

Soo... i guess i'll start copying my buttons to all the slides.. and i assume that right about when i'm DONE with that.. and have it all working perfectly.. someone will post the proper solution!

Hehe that would be typical!

You could ask someone in the staff if they have a better solution, as they usually have alternative solutions to most issues.

This would make for a good feature request though, as this like you say is something that SL should be able to handle...

I can send a request

Because of the nonlinear nature of many courses, and especially with branching, it's a little hard to predict sometimes what scene should be jumped that at the end of a scene.

YMMV, but I would not want Storyline to guess what scene to jump to when it reached the end of a scene.

In cases like this, a hybrid approach with previous/next buttons on masters and individual slides with their own "non-master" next and previous buttons on them makes sense.

You have a point Gerry, but as a linear builder preferring to solve the occational branch with a custom slide with multiple layers, I would prefer the chronological, master-slide-based custom navigation between slides/scenes to at least be an option.

Easier to customize the occational slide, then to have to customize every slide if you know what I mean

Also, I wish the story view would recognize the master-slide-based custom navigation. In a lengthy course with custom navigation, the story view is kind of useless, as the order becomes somewhat random...

I'll paste the Feature request i sent regarding this issue:)

Feature Request Number: 00290535

Request Details:

Custom navigation on slide

I have two requests, and a comment to the story view:)

1) When creating custom navigation in a slide, it would be nice to be able to do that in masterslides, instead of having to copy/paste the buttons to each slide.

2) Also it would be nice if it was possible to create a custom next button that allowed navigation between scenes. As of now it will only jump to slides within a scene, not between scenes.

When inserting custom navigation, the story view shows the scenes as one long column instead of a row of columns...which means a lot of scrolling!  

--Eilert  

Love everything optional hehe

Yup--except Storyline's goodness, this community working so well, and Articulate developing killer software  

Now those are required.

True hehe

Howdy,

This thread is a few months old, but in thinking about it, I have a question. I was thinking the hybrid approach, but then I came up with this situation: there are some slides where I don't want the custom prev/next button to appear at all, or maybe on some slides I want it to come in "later." That's one of the advantages of the custom buttons as opposed to the default ones on the player, which can be disabled, but not hidden, at least as I understand it.

So, in that case (needing to hide them or delay them), isn't it just easier in the end to copy/paste them on each slide - not pasting them where I don't want them, and adjusting the time where that needs to be done?

Otherwise, I have them all on the master; and then I need to make adjustments on individual slides anyway. And if I didn't want them to appear at all, wouldn't that mean creating a "matching colored" shape over the buttons so they wouldn't show? And couldn't that get messy and time consuming?

All opinions appreciated!

If your using a liner build, have you tried to build it in presenter and use the floating navigation panel?

http://daveperso.mediaenglishonline.com/2009/07/28/using-floating-controls-in-presenter-09/

Hello,

I've read the above with some interest, and I've had a thought.

What about creating a true/false variable called "endscene" which is set to true when on the final slide in a scene (then back to false when leaving this slide). Then in your custom next button, add a trigger to skip to next scene with an "if" condition to evaluate whether "endscene" is true.

This would only work with a linear course, which mine happens to be.

Jade, thanks for the suggestion which sounds awesome and I will try.

For some reason, my Master slide-based next/back buttons don't always bring me back to the previous slide within a scene. I was wondering, are there variables I could add that would ensure these buttons always take me to the previous/next slide in a linear course?

Chris, I have seen this suggestion before but sadly do not own a copy of Presenter. It sounds like exactly what I need as long as the appearance is totally customizable.

Hi Bart

Just had an issue with the next/prev buttons as well.

The solution for me was simply to make sure that the slides are in the correct order. In storyview, drag and drop the slides in the order that you want them to be in. Should result in next/prev-button actually leading to the slide that you intended.

Hope this solves your issue.

Eilert

Thanks Eilert for sharing your solution! 

Bart, I'm not sure Jade subscribes to this thread, so you may want to PM her if needed. 

Yes thanks for the response. My slides are in correct order in Storyview. Not sure what the issue is. I will try contacting Jade directly. I appreciate the recommendations!

Bart, also feel free to share your .story file here and others in the community can help too! If you'd prefer to not post it in the forums our Support team is always happy to take a look as well.  

Hi folks,

Unfortunately I never did get this to work quite as I'd intended - I think it's just because, as pointed out by others above, Storyline can't determine what the next scene is.

My solution was to do the first half of my proposed solution:

creating a true/false variable called "endscene" which is set to true when on the final slide in a scene (then back to false when leaving this slide)

Then using this to hide the slide master next button on the final slide in each scene, and paste a copy of the next button onto the actual slide with a trigger to the scene it ought to go to. Not particularly elegant, but it works.

Jade, thank you for popping back in and sharing your solution. 

Hi everyone,

I've quickly read through this thread, and I'm having the same issue with custom nav buttons not jumping to the next scene (which is the next slide) in a linear course.

Is it safe to say then that it's not a good idea to put custom nav in the slide master? I thought it would save me some time but now I am thinking the opposite since I need to set individual triggers in order to get it to jump to the next scene.

Since Storyline automatically numbers scenes in a linear fashion, I would've thought this would be built in to the "next slide" trigger. Am I missing something critical here?

Any input is appreciated :)

Hello Erika!

This thread is a bit dated, but it does sound like you are experiencing the same challenge that the users shared here.

As you can see in the conversation here, the jump to next scene is not the same as jump to next slide, even if your course is linear.

Looks like Jade had a great solution she posted here. Hopefully that will work well for you also or someone will be able to pop in and share a design idea with you.

Thanks!

I got stumped by this myself recently, and after messing around with variables and ordering for a while, I decided to go with a low-headache low-tech solution, by duplicating the menu master slide, naming the copies "Start of section 1" / "End of section 1" (2,3 etc), then specifying exactly which slides I wanted them to jump to on the hotspots, and just applied those masters to the appropriate slides in the course. All other slides just have the normal menu master slide with prev and next slide hotspots.

This works seamlessly for a linear course, and for free exploration courses, I set the first slide in each section to jump back to the main welcome/menu page so that it doesn't jump to the last page of a section the person may not have visited yet. This approach might be a bit of a pain if you have a lot of sections in your course however, and you definitely don't want to do the master slide duplicating until you are done with your content and 100% happy with your original menu master slide.

Hope this helps someone until this gets ironed out as a feature request.

Thanks for popping in to share Stacey :)