Improvements to the interface/design capabilties

May 14, 2014

Hi,

I'm not sure if this is the best place to put this but let me know if I should move it. I've been using Storyline for around 6 months now and while I appreciate the simplicity the software brings to creating interactive eLearning I feel there is a lot of missing functionality from a designer's perspective that make it hard to use to ensure quality design and layout. Here are a list of improvements that could really put this software over the edge:

  • In general, import more of the functionality that PowerPoint has already into Articulate 
  • Bullets.... they lack of customization on text formatting in general is awful. I realize you are trying to ensure these files convert to HTML5 but that doesn't mean you need to strip out bullet/text formatting from the software entirely. I'd love to import the standard bullet editing/animating feature from PPT to make the conversion seamless 
  • Text in general is really wonky in this software. When you publish the results also vary. It makes it difficult to ensure the final product will look good because of this and having to go back and tweak text size/location because of this ambiguity costs development time-which is the most precious thing eLearning has.
  • Tables - Why aren't tables easier to create? While I don't condone the overuse of tables anywhere they are still a helpful tool in some scenarios. The pharma industry especially loves them to show complex data.
  • Streaming audio - This is a big one. It's one of the features of Flash that made it so powerful. You can scrub along the timeline to here where objects/text need to be synced without having to listen the entire audio to set markers every time. Again, it was much faster in Flash than here.

Take some of these things into consideration for the next version of the software. If you can add features like this and just make the conversion from PPT to Storyline that much more seamless your product will be that much more competitive in this market.  

1 Reply
Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi PF,

You're always welcome to share those thoughts and ideas here in the forums, and you may want to send them along as feature requests as those go directly to our product development team for review and inclusion in future updates and versions of Storyline. 

To answer a few of your specific questions/ideas:

  • Importing from Powerpoint to Storyline is not a one to one conversion, as described here  and if you're looking to leverage more of the built in Powerpoint features or are more comfortable with it's design/functionality you may also want to look into using Presenter which is an add on to Powerpoint. 
  • Currently, Storyline does not support tables.  In the meantime, here are some alternatives for adding tables to your Storyline courses
  • The text quality when publishing is something our team is continuing to look into and work on for future updates of Storyline. I'd suggest following Articulate on Facebook, Twitter and subscribing to our Word of Mouth blog to see the most recent updates and information. 

If you need anything else please feel free to let us know, and definitely send in those as feature requests - incredibly helpful for our team and we always want to know what we can do to make Articulate products better! 

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