Hiding Next Button until Slide Transition is over - SL

Jan 12, 2015

Hello

Just curious if there was a way to "fade" or "hide" the next button until the slide transition in Storyline has finished.  Then the Next button can appear or be highlighted for the user to proceed? 

Thanks.

6 Replies
Greg Faust

Short answer: No, but you can still do what I think you want to do.

The "Next" button's existence is all-or-nothing for a given slide. You set in the slide's player properties whether that slide has a "Next" button, and that's that.

I suspect, though, that what you really want is:

  1. To control when the learner is able to advance to the next slide, and
  2. To give the learner a visual clue when and how they able to advance

This article explains two ways to accomplish the first goal. Basically, you can either disable the "Next button until some condition is met, OR you can remove the "Next" button from the player and have your own custom "Next" button appear on the slide.

As for the visual clue, the second method in the linked article accomplishes this automatically: The learner can see the custom "Next" button appear. To give a clue with the first method, you can trigger the appearance of a text box ("Click 'Next' to Continue", for example), plus an arrow pointing at where the "Next" button is.

Method 3:

If you really have your heart set on making the "Next" button appear, you can break your slide into two slides:

  1. The first contains the content for before "Next" appears and has "Next" disabled in slide properties. When the timeline finishes, it automatically advances to the second slide.
  2. The second contains the content for after "Next" appears and has "Next" enabled in slide properties.

This method risks being clunky when users want to re-watch content, and I don't recommend it unless you have a strong understanding of:

  1. Seekbars
  2. "On revisit" behavior
  3. Navigation triggers

I hope that helps. If you're still unsure, please let us know more details of what you need to accomplish (for example, what specifically needs to be the event that enables the learner to advance?).

Greg Faust

No, but there are a lot of things that are "impossible" right up until someone figures out a workaround that makes them possible. If you figure out a way to make this possible, please let us know.

Failing that, here's the kind of thing I do when I need a visual cue on the "Next" button (or any other player object):

copyright 2015 Greg Faust

This is a screenshot from a published presentation. This slide comes after a long series of auto-advance slides. I wanted to give the learner a visual clue that they needed to take action to proceed. So, after several seconds, the red text and arrow appear.

I added the magenta line to show what I could see in Slide View. The stuff around it was added automatically by Storyline. Hence, I had to angle that arrow without actually seeing the Next button I was pointing to.

 

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