Menu Outline.. Need your help

Feb 01, 2013

zola anderson
By zola anderson

All,

I need your help with some ideas as to best way to display the menu outline in Storyline 

I'm creating a large simulation course for a client about using their IT system. Each screen has a lot of fields where explanation is given to each field. Some fields it is a mouse click and others are either text entry or simply an explanation

The whole course is a demo mode

I created the course fine however I'm struggling with the menu appearance. As you all know you can only have one mouse click/movement in the slide. Unfortunately I have hundreds of menu items, some are literally just 5 to 10 seconds.

Hiding them from the menu will not do the learners good as going to the main screen menu item and have to click next, next to reach that invisible transaction is very confusing. 

The course uses the seekbar but it is only for the slide, there is no way currently to group multiple slides in one seekbar

What is a better way to display such a menu? Any help or ideas will be greatly appreciated as the client will not be impressed with such a large menu. I even ran out of namings for each menu item!

The client is used to captivate in articulate Presenter where the SWF file with multiple actions is added as one item in the course menu. This was great but the clients wants iPad and is impressed with Storyline other capabilities

Thanks a lot

zola

2 Replies
Donna Morvan
over 11 years ago02/01/13 at 6:14 am (UTC)

Hello Zola,

You can go to Player Properties and Edit your menu from there. You do have an option to delete the the slide titles there that you don't necessarily want to show on the menu.

In the screenshot below, I actually have 4 slides but deleted the titles of the 3 so that it'll show just the 1.

Another option, you can go with is to hide the menu altogether and customize a new one instead. I personally like using Lightboxes as menu. You can just set up a persistent button on the slide master and set a trigger to call a lightbox containing all your menu items. This way, you can get really creative with how you want the menu to look. I deal with creating materials for hardware and software so I completey understand where you're coming from. Here's a basic look of a customized menu (course map) I used. From here they can jump to any portion of the course.

Hope this helps,

Donna

Bob Wiker
over 11 years ago02/01/13 at 7:18 am (UTC)

Maybe create your "menu" on a slide, then lightbox that slide whenever learners click a "Menu" button or tab that you've set up in your Player? The menu slide you build would contain links to all the hundreds of slides in your project. The trick will be to design your Menu slide of  links so that it is organized and user-friendly.

As for grouping multiple demo slides together as one, would it be possible to group slides into scenes that you create, then set up your navigation accordingly?

Scene A: slide 12, slide 13, slide 14, slide 15, slide 16

Scene B: slide 17, slide 18, slide 19

Scene C: slide 20, slide 21, slide 22, slide 23, slide 24, slide 25

--The Scenes are set up normally to jump from the end of one scene to the beginning of the next, yielding a continuous, beginning-to-end demo.

--If you want an option for learners to watch a single sequence (Scene A, B, then C) and then return to your Main Menu you could maybe set a True/False variable such as "ReturnToMenu" to True when learner clicks a Main Menu link, then have triggers on slides 16, 19, and 25 that send the learner back to Main Menu if ReturnToMenu is true.

This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.