How to make interactivity work when Learner interrupts sequence?

Sorry, I forgot to clarify in my origional post above that there's no specific order to the Topics.  The Learner can click on any Topic in any order as long as they view and listen to the audio for all 6 topics.

Hi Tracey, if you add all your buttons to a button set, they will automatically return to normal when no longer selected. To assign a button to a button set just right-click on the button and then select button set from the menu.

To stop the audio tracks from overlapping go to each layer and click the property settings, make sure the option to pause the base timeline and  the option to hide other layers are selected.

Hi Nancy,

Thank you for your very quick response!  I'm grateful for your help.  I'm still relatively new to Storyline so please forgive my follow-up questions:

1. I'm not familiar with button sets.  Do I have to set each Topic to the same button set?  I assume yes, but would like confirmation.
2. I do have the Base timeline set to pause on the layer properties, but I can't set the option to "hide the other layers" because I actually want to show the bulleted text of other layers once the Learner has clicked on a Topic and listened to the entire audio clip.  I only want to hide the bulleted list if a Learner interrupts the audio and clicks to another topic.  I welcome your suggestions on how to make this happen.

Thank you!

Hi Tracey, Button Sets are a way to group buttons to ensure that only one button can be selected at a time. All the buttons you have on the slide should be assigned to the same button set. If you right-click on a button you will get a popup menu. One of the options is Button Set as shown in the picture. You will see that by default the button set is set to none. Select Button set 1 to assign the button to a button set. Do this for all your buttons - they should all be assigned to Button Set 1.

As for your second question - it might be more of a challenge. So if I understand you correctly, you have several layers that users access by clicking buttons on the base slide - each of these layers has some bullet points and some audio.  You do not want to hide the layers when the user clicks a button to go to another layer unless the audio on the layer they are currently on has not finished playing.

Is this correct?

If this is correct, I think you might have to create some variables to do what you want. Let me play around a bit to see if I can come up with something.

Hi Tracey,

Hope it's OK with you and Nancy that I jumped in. I had a thought about how this could work and was going to wait, since I'm sure Nancy has her own thoughts, but then I thought while I'm here I'll post it. I'll never remember to come back and check later...and in case Nancy gets busy and can't get back here quickly.

Yes, all the Topics would be part of one button set. Here's a  Mike Taylor blog post on them.

Re keeping all the text boxes on once they're turned on, you could place them on the base layer in the desired position, beside each Topic button and set their initial states to hidden. Then, add a trigger that changes their states to normal when they're associated button is clicked. For example: change the state of the Bullleted List box beside Topic 1 to normal when the Learner clicks the Topic 1 button.

That way, you can keep the "hide other slide layers" checkbox on and your audio will be OK.

Yikes, Nancy, you posted before I clicked!

Ok, I think I got it. I have attached a story file for you to look at. My example only has 2 layers.

You are going to have to create a true/false variable for each layer. When you create the variables set the initial value to false.  (You click on the x icon to create in the triggers panel to create the variable.

On each layer you are going to have to add a trigger to change the variable to true when the media completes. 

Then on the base layer you are going to have to add triggers to each of the buttons to hide the other layers when clicked if the variables are false. I am not sure how many buttons you have but  for each button you are going to have to create a trigger for each of the other layers - In my example I only have one trigger per button because there are only 2 layers, but if you have 4 buttons then you are going to need 3 triggers per button.

I hope this makes some sense.

Thanks for jumping in Rebecca, maybe you can help explain my ramblings

Hi Nancy and Rebecca!   THANK YOU!!!  I'm very excited for your solutions.  I think both options will work for my needs.  As a learning experience, I'll try both.  I can already feel the stress of figuring this out coming off my shoulders.     I'm also very thankful that you both took time on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon to respond.  

Many thanks!

Hi Nancy,

Your option with the variables worked perfectly to ensure that audio was listened to in its entirety before the bulleted text remained visible on the slide for the other topics.   Thank you so much for providing a sample file for me to review and learn from!!