Name trigger to advance

Hi Karen, 

Nice job! You're well on your way! And actually, you don't even need any more variables to accomplish what you want. Attached is a slightly modified version of the file, which I think will give you the behavior you want. And here's a quick run-down of what I did:

https://jeanette.viewscreencasts.com/958805d8716697800e10762d138d610d

BTW, I saw you also have a "question" and "answer" layer but I wasn't sure when/if you wanted that to display. So I didn't touch those layers or discus those in the screencast.

As always you rock!  i will have a look tomorrow and pose some addtional questions

Yes, the question and answer thingy was just from one of the links you sent me to use a users response and compare it to that of either the right one or the general consensus so to speak.

I am grinning from ear to ear! You cleaned up my slide nicely, thanks Thank you for the keen eye and your comprehension skill from my convoluted . What I walked away with was:

1- I can't place a trigger on slide items, need to create a new layer to place whatever i want to happen for that trigger.

2- Tidy up the states of the button when i customize them.

3- Layout the development design for each slide or interaction carefully, including the triggers and what i want happening.

4- Send Jeannette a home made holiday card just to say thanks for all her assistance.

Now my other questions: )

-How much in depth planning does one have to do when developing your storyboard? I am asking because I used to just send mine with events to my developer who mainly used flash. I like having control over my own designs because I like making adhoc changes

and feel I can execute my vision better. I am very good at designing my storyboards (SB) and am having a new found appreciation for intricacies when it comes to development. Storyline at least makes it easier.

- How do I keep track of these variables and I obviously can't use the same variable for other slides in the design, right?

- You demonstrated something very significantly in the screencast - e.g. change of state trigger. I would never have know to do this to achieve the effect I wanted. The questions begs to be asked again as to when to know how to use the triggers and the variables...?? SIgn! I guess I am learning as I am going along, but utilizing your Storyline-creative brain, right?

- When I design my SB I have a method to the madness. Does the same apply when using Storyline so to speak? Do I do the graphics first, create the interactions, etc etc....

Thanks again!

Hi again Karen - regarding the planning time - I think it kind of depends on how interactive your course will be. For some stuff, you hardly need to do any planning at all (if it's just the standard type of linear course with narration)... you can just start prototyping it all right in Storyline. For more interactive content, I think it's helpful to first spend a little time thinking about what you'd like learners to DO or PRACTICE during their learning experience, and how you want the course to respond to the learner's actions. So I guess my advice would be to make a rough outline or content plan identifying the basic flow and design of your course, and for the interactive slides you'll want to have a clear idea of how you want the course to behave in response to the learner. Then come here to the forums and ask the community for their ideas & suggestions on how best to build it in Storyline. Honestly, I would say that about 80% of the interactions people tend to build can typically be done with 3 simple Storyline tools: states, layers, and triggers. In many interactions, you don't even need to fuss with creating or manipulating variables.

Regarding your other questions:

• Think of triggers as simply actions that you want the course to perform.
• Think of states as just different versions or different appearances of a particular object on your slide.
• Think of variables as bits of data (such as a number, text, or a true/false value) that Storyline pays attention to, so that you can use that data as the basis of triggers on any slide in your course.

Variable values are maintained across an entire project, so for example if you have the learner make a choice or perform some action on slide 1, and you want to use their action as the basis of a trigger on slide 25, you would need to use a variable for that. States are maintained only on a particular slide. 

I hope that helps! Definitely feel free to start a new thread if you have a particular thing in mind that you want to build but are not sure how. The community here is amazing and you'll get some great ideas and advice. 

Hi Jeanette and Karen,

Comments and a question:

Comments

First affirmation: yes, this is a great community.

Karen, I saw your post and decided to take a look at the story to see if I understood what you wanted and if I could get it to work before watching JB's Scrennr (great development practice when there's a bit of time). So, thanks for posting.

K and J, I was able to accomplish what K wanted, but I'd set up a warning layer that was triggered by the tabs, and I too didn't like that the tab showed as selected even though the layer wasn't being displayed.

So, Jeanette, thanks for the clever idea to place an invisible shape over the tabs and have that be the triggering object.

Design Question

In my version, I have the Learners typing their name in the text box under "Welcome" on the first screen. If they don't type their name in, the warning layer appears and an animated shape points to the box and has text saying "type your name here, then click the tab."

BUT

Instead of having a button for them to go back to the base layer and do it, they can do it right there; that is type their name, click the tab, and they're good to go.

Which would be a better design? Which would be least confusing/most understood by the Learner? Thoughts?

Good point Rebecca. Hence me trying to also understand why only layers can have triggers place don them and not items on the base layer. Did you manage to accomplish this? I don't like lost of clicking unless necessary. How did you do it? Can I have a look if you did manage to fox it?

Ta! 

Hi Karen & Becky!

Actually Karen, just to clarify, triggers can exist on the base layer OR on individual slide layers. Sorry if I was misleading on that. You can definitely create a trigger to do just about anything.

And Becky, yah, I like your idea! In fact, taking it another step further, rather than a warning layer, you could in fact create just a simple textbox on your base layer to contain your warning message, and set its initial state to Hidden. Then if learners try to click a tab without entering anything in the field, you could have a trigger which changes the state of the warning message to Normal. Then change it back to hidden again once they enter something. Nice idea! 

Jeanette and becky, 

That seems more doable.  I will try that and if I am stuck i will let you know

Hi Karen and Jeanette,

I need to sign off soon, but it seems I become addicted to these Q and A's and keep saying "Just one more." They're like M&Ms

So, yes, Karen, I was able to do it, but as I said, I changed things a bit. So in my version (attached) Learners must type their names in the box below the welcome box. If they don't, the Warning layer appears. You'll see the the arrow flys in from the bottom, pointing to the box where they're supposed to type.

One other thing I had to do: on each tab layer, in the Base Layer Objects section of the timeline, I had to hide the LearnerName box.

I'll upload it now. And I think I have a few minutes to make the change suggested by Jeanette. If so, I'll upload that version also.

K. For this one I

• Removed the warning layer
• Placed the Warning Arrow on the Base Layer and set it to hidden
• Added a trigger to:
  Action: Change the state of
  On Object: Warning Arrow
  To state: Normal
  When: User Clicks
  Object: Oops rectangle
• On Condition
  If: LearnerName
  Operator: = = Equal to (ignore case)
  Type: Value
  Value:

I also had to hide the Warning Arrow in the Base Layer Objects section for each tab

Hey Becky,

Good job and thanks fr being so thorough.

So, after  10 minutes of applying some logic and brain power - I took it one step further.

I created another trigger to hide the warning arrow once the learner enters the name. 

Yes, I am on my way to master these variables.

Thanks!

Hi Karen,

<>>

Excellent! Yes, I should have done that in the first place, then there's no need to hide the warning arrow in the layers - so less work. JB had suggested that but I got distracted by a phone call or something and lost my train of thought.

For anyone else who perhaps is reading this or has looked at my version of Karen's story:

enter name to access tab_plus_visted tabs show visited state_v2.story

the way to hide the warning arrow once Learners enter their names is to create a new trigger:

• Action: Change state of
• On Object: Warning arrow (or whatever object you've assigned where Learner must enter text)
• To state: Hidden
• When: Variable changes
• Variable: LearnerName (this is the name of the text entry variable requiring the Learner to type their name in order to move to the next tab)

Rebecca,

Thanks. I  didn't want to go that route because I thought in order to change the learnername variable I will have to add a 0 or 1 ( which I did and when previewing it showed the 0  when I assigned the condition - 0=no entry and 1 = when user enters name, right?)

These are the types of questions that are confusing when it comes to that...lol!

Instead I did this:

• Action: Change state of
• On Object: Warning arrow (or whatever object you've assigned where Learner must enter text)
• To state: Hidden
• When: User clicks
• Variable: LearnerName (this is the name of the text entry variable requiring the Learner to type their name in order to move to the next tab)

I tested it and it worked. However not sure how it would affect other things if I play around more. 

Oh boy! My 3rd attempt to post this. 

I am kicking it up a notch and this what I'd like to happen:

1. The user has to go linearly through the tabs because there is a question on the last tab. Yes, I could have created a side or layer for it, but I am trying to think outside the box and be more creative.
2. The tabs can of course be revisited, but maintaining their visited state as previously done.
3. Maybe create a blink tab effect when user enters name to show where to start?

Somehow I can't upload the file. 

Here is the dropbox public download:   http://db.tt/4OntxYkN

Phewww!!!!! I am getting there and you will see I did a few things on the quesion slides

Any feedback will be helpful. Please remember this is just practice slides and I am not focusing on the design elements in terms of visuals yet. Need to get the engine running first.

Thanks in advance Team Articulate and Peers!

Hi Karen,

Phew is right! Nice!

I did a quick think. I know you can set add a disable state to tabs and set the tabs, i.e., tabs 2, 3, 4, 5, to an initial state of disabled. And, you can tell SL to set the tabs to normal after other tabs have been selected, e.g.,

• change the state of tab 2 to normal IF tab 1=selected
• change the state of tab 3 to normal IF tab 1 AND tab 2 are selected

That forces Learners to go through them in order

BUT, the only way I know of to do this is to have the Learner go back to the base layer where the successive tabs have become enabled.

You could insert a close button on the various layers (say on the top right corner of each rectangle you've placed on each layer) that when clicked by the Learner returns them to the Base Layer.

Other community members may know how to do this without returning to the base layer.

Thanks Rebecca. This has become increasingly hard the more design elements I add to it. I tried it, but not quit the interaction I ma looking for. I will spend another 4 hrs trying to figure this out

Karen

Hi Karen,

At some point it DOES become easier to insert slides instead of adding layers. You may want to consider that in your design.

Hey Karen, one thing I've experienced is that if I build an interaction and then change my mind midstream about how it should behave, sometimes I actually find it more work to "re-tool" the interaction than it would be to build from scratch. Storyline has some amazing logic tools, but if you decide to really switch up the logic behind the interaction, you night find that the initial "build" of the project might be hard to retrofit.  It's usually much easier if you have a clear design in mind for your interaction, and then build to that plan.

Were you able to get the behavior you want out of your project? If you're looking to build a totally linear interaction, that's quite a bit different than what's typical for an interactive tabs slide with layers. For linear content, you might actually be better off building a linear series of slides, and use a slide master for the persistent objects to cut down on development time. 

I hear you Jeanette. but if  I do design from scratch and not with our current project, How would that look? I don't think it is necessary to use so many slides unless it is scenario, but for linear progression, I think it is ok to you layers.

Also, I did n't know this about SL:

1- If I copy a layer it copies everything including the hidden objects that I of course do not want. This means hiding the same items numerous times. Am I just doing it wrong or is there another way?

2- I realized that DND can only be created on a slide and not a layer. It would have been good to know this when i started designing my dnd interaction yesterday...hahahaha

Oh, well. I shall trudge along. I do have some questions about the DnD that seems a little too weird and how it translates to reset button and submit button. I will start a new thread on this.

Thanks so much, Jeannette. Watching and listening to your demo (posted for Karen E on Nov 2) helped me to fix my text entry problem  . I had trouble explaining to Support exactly what I wanted to do, but once you explained variables, it was simple!

I'm planning to read through the rest of the thread to see what other problems it might solve for me!

With great appreciation,

Judith