From your own experience how has Articulate Storyline 2 worked as far a user friendly, editing content, getting up to speed and dynamic performance. I am starting out looking at different options for e-learning tools and read 3 party blogs but would love to hear back from present users. Positives and maybe the short coming if possible.
I tested a LOT of different rapid e-learning tools before deciding on Storyline but I definitely don't regret my decision.
I think the good people at Articulate made a smart decision when they chose to make the UI of Storyline so similar to that of MS Office programs. It's definitely user friendly (assuming one knows Office) and allowed me to get up to speed very quickly. Now that I'm more experienced, I sometimes find that the Office-style UI forces me to do things in a certain way that may not be the most efficient way, but I'm willing to accept that trade off ... and even after using Storyline and Storyline 2 for a few years now, I'm still finding new things that I can do, so there's power under the hood, too.
In fact, one of the major reasons that I chose Storyline originally was its ease of use. My modus operandi at the time was to download a free trial of a tool and try to use it to build a particular e-learning module. Storyline was the only tool that allowed me to build the module without reading a manual or help file or searching the Internet for help.
In terms of performance, I haven't every really had an issue with Storyline or Storyline 2. It's perhaps not the platform you would choose for developing fast-moving games-based e-learning, but for most other uses, I'd say it's as good as anything on the market and better than most.
I just want to say that Storyline is not user friendly, easy to use, etc. I'm kidding :) It has the greatest user experience. Now softwares must have a powerfull user experience not just user interface. Maybe putting in client's shoes you will understand better. And not only the software is good, but also the community. Keep it on the right track guys. Thank you!
All I can tell you is that after having purchased and used competing software I now will not use anything but Storyline 2. (Okay, okay... Storyline 1 too if a client hasn't upgraded just yet.)
It's simple enough to get up to speed quickly, but has capabilities deep and powerful enough to meet every client need (and for me, most every creative need) I could ask for.
The greatest things about Storyline 2 (and 1) Story View and Layers. Having used plenty of other tools for me it is these features that makes storyline stand out,making it super easy to create branched interactions and not be forced into the linear next, next, next thinking.
Getting up to speed is quick too, especially with the help of the Heroes community.
I use Articulate Storyline since the begining in France, and i find until now it is the best software for elearning. And since last year, i begun to work with both Storyline 1 and Storyline 2. It's very cool that Storyline 2 has the french and chinese version.
For me Storyline 2 is more powerful then 1, i had a course which contiens more than 500 slides and i must publish it into two part because it's too big and Storyline 1 can not handle it. But with 2, the publish is easy and quick.
Then what i like the most is the animation, the limite of animation in 1 is a big pb for us. But the 2 provides us more options.
I have been on both sides of Storyline (support as a partner and development in my current role) and I must say that Storyline 2 is fantastic. Once you get past basic usability, you will soon be creating advanced functionality and actively looking for new ways to address challenges.
The community here is also fantastic, with a range of help and resources.
I have been using Storyline since the early SL1 days. It is, in my opinion, the best elearning development product out there for ease of use and customization. This may sound cheesy, but I have found that with Storyline, your creativity is never limited by the tool. You imagine what you want, and Storyline basically does the heavy lifting for you via Triggers, Object States, and Layers. Articulate has essentially designed the tool to be developer friendly, while at the same time giving the developer some very powerful options which he or she can learn to take training to a whole new level of interactivity. In addition to the tool, Articulate also provides an unprecedented level of support for their products, not the least of which is their content developer blogs, tips, free elearning books, and weekly challenges, which have been very helpful for me in designing more effective training.
It looks and feels much like Power Point on steroids having a baby with the good old versions of Movie Maker, so it's almost instantly graspable by anyone.
First, welcome to the community. E-Learning Heroes is, to me, what puts Articulate ahead of everyone else. If I'm stuck on a project, I can come here and find solutions either through previous threads, or by starting a new thread. Everyone here, including the staff, are extremely helpful. Plus, there are weekly challenges that will not only help you build your development skills with Storyline, but also allows you to see what great creations others are coming up with.
I currently use Storyline 2 and my favorite function is probably the "States". With the amount of work you can do with the states, you can take 4 slides, for example, and condense them into 1 slide, and it's interactive for the user. Plus, with the pre-built states that come with Articulate, you do not have to add any additional triggers.
As others have mentioned, it has a similar look/feel to the Microsoft Office products, so you can pick it up really quick. I would suggest also subscribing to Articulate's YouTube channel because they have some great demos out there on how to perform different functions with Storyline.
Download the free trial and give it a shot! Stop back and let us know what you think.
Storyline is the BEST tool ever. It is simple to use and user-friendly. You can create great and superb courses from it. No tool can be compared with this.
I started working on Storyline three months back and now I have a Storyline 2 license in which I have finished up working on two long e-learning modules. Previously, I have worked in Outstart LCMS (Force10), Lectora and Captivate, but still I can say that by far with limited technical knowledge Storyline is indeed the tool you can bank on. Several features including Triggers, States, MotionPath etc. make it the best tool. Interestingly, if one knows PowerPoint, it's pretty much each to work on Storyline and of course with just few hours practice on other functionalities. However, it's up to your visualization that makes your e-learning modules different from others, and using Storyline for those many powerful interactions is just amazing.
I've been using Storyline for the last 2 years and love the program. Although there is a bit of a learning curve depending on the complexity of your training package, it is a great program. However, and this is important for new user, if you're going to change computer, be very careful. I was running SL2 on a 3 year old computer and recently upgraded to a new faster computer. All transfers were performed by our IT department. To accommodate the transfer, I had to deactivate all my Articulate products.
Unfortunately, SL1 and 2 changed the file extensions of all my training programs and left them unusable. I have been in contact with SL support (who by the way are great as well) but to no avail since they had no solution for the problem. I should mention that there was no warning that this would occur before I completed the deactivation of the software.
The end result is I probably have over 1,000 hours of development time that is down the proverbial toilet! That's a learning curve I hope that no one else has to experience. In the meantime, I'll re-develop the courses!
Coming from over 15 years of being a novice and professional Flash developer I am delighted by the ease at which SL2 allows you to do a lot of general animated tasks much more quickly than was possible in Flash. I miss the detailed animation I used to be able to do with Flash. And even though I know I can import Flash files into SL2 our company prefers we not use Flash even if HTML5 isn't called for.
More so, after developing with a few other elearning development tools in the last 4 years, I have to say that SL2 has been the most pleasant to develop in! I can point out a bunch of things that have become extremely time saving! I'm not fussing with HTML5 testing anymore to see if the slides I have developed will work in all the major browsers. Interactions don't break as they have in other elearning development tools. I don't have to waste time setting up code to reset an interaction. Image resizing and object swapping is way faster than anything else I've used. State duplication with the format painter tool over multiple objects saves so much time. And much much more!
The biggest difference overall is that I'm back to spending much more of my time doing what I enjoy about elearning (since Apple screwed up everything by deciding not to support Flash on the iphone). I'm back to creating engaging interactions that make me feel good about what I do in my profession!
I have been using Articulate Storyline 2 now for a few months, to create e-learning courses on CRM software for a global telecommunications company. Before this, I worked for a while with Articulate Studio, but since our company has standardized to Storyline 2, I am a big fan of Storyline.
I started with E-learning in 1998 when working for a pan-European telecommunications company, creating an ‘Online Learning Centre', hosted on the Intranet, featuring a few online introduction courses about products and services. I used Microsoft FrontPage, PowerPoint for illustrations and a simple program (QuizPlease) for multiple choice quizzes. That implied a lot of old fashioned 'handwork' to get it all together, but it worked fine, and my target audience (European sales managers) could take online courses as a preparation for a live workshop at HQ.
Now working with Articulate Storyline, I appreciate the rich functionality (triggers, layers, states, screen-casts in view, try & test mode, import audio files, ease of editing, etc. etc.) and the fact that I can create a complete e-learning course with a single program, based on a PowerPoint presentation. With my next step, applying Text-to-Speech software for creating voice overs, I have everything I need to create compelling and engaging e-learning courses, right from behind my computer. Amazing.
I have developed in both Captivate, Lectora and Storyline 1 and 2. I think Captivate gives the most power, but your creativity will work with a lot more technical problem solving and fidgeting. I base my experience on working with Captivate 4-7.
Storyline 2 does indeed allow you to be rather creative quickly. The States of images and the well thought out Trigger system allows you to build some quite nice stuff.
In my own work, I managed to move from director / ID to pure developer, because in the old days I used to have a Flash developer do my Fancy Stuff for me in Captivate. Now I do almost all of it myself in Storyline 2.
Tom, you just cannot go wrong with SL. I've been doing this for 15 years, have used Toolbook (back in the day), Flash-only dev, etc. SL is the most intuitive and powerful tool I've ever owned in terms of elearning authoring. For this last project, I got two student workers up to speed in SL dev in a week's time. Keep posting!
Does anyone remember Macromedia Studio? Ha! Those were the days. (I sound like one of those parents who lecture their kids about how many miles they had to walk to school every day.)
I love the capabilities of Articulate Storyline. However, I do wish it could do a few things, like let you change the format of a question, drag and drop pages to organize your Story View, show you unused files in your project (to keep file size down), and offer more space in Articulate Tempshare for bigger projects.
These forums are the best! Hearing opinions and ideas from other elearning designers and developers challenges me to keep improving.
I've been very happy with the entire Articulate suite of authoring tools. I've been doing eLearning since 2002 and have used everything from Dreamweaver/Flash, Lectora, Captivate (which used to be RoboDemo, used that too), Trainersoft, OutStart LCMS, etc. etc.
Storyline, in my opinion, does a great job of making the more advanced features of the tools easily accessible from a workflow point of view, allowing designer/developers to create very robust content in less time.
I've done some Storyline workshops here where I work and almost everytime there area few Captivate users in the audience. My question to them is always, "How long would it have taken to build this exact same thing in Captivate?" The response is always "A lot longer, much longer".
SL2 is pretty easy to use, you can customize and build something relatively quick, compared to other tools out there. It's straight forward and that's the beauty of it - similar to MS Office style with the ribbon and right clicking objects. That's definitly the appeal for me, along with the articulate community.
There are some issues though, like some components not working in FF in HTML5... but they work in Flash and other browsers and the fact that it doesn't support responsive design. I'm hoping SL3 would have that fixed :) other than that, it's great
Echoing all that everyone has already said! My experience started with a proprietary LMS authoring environment. From there moved to Lectora. Next was Captivate. Then Articulate Studio '09, and finally settling on Storyline.
Not having experience with all authoring tools on the market other than a free trail test here and there, I have used the big three (Lectora, Captivate, Storyline) in real-world projects.
I run a company now that specializes in custom designed elearning that is solely dependent on Storyline as the chosen main authoring tool. If the fate of my utility bills getting paid is a sign of comfort, reviewing this tool against the others for selection in your organization is hands down the best choice.
Why?
Lectora - it's roots are in HTML and has a powerful ability to program via "actions" and has supported Javascript for a long time. Biggest learning curve of all. Good user community.
Captivate - it's roots are in screen casting and has evolved into an elearning development tool. Too buggy for me (still), learning curve is...well, Adobe. Yet it can handle just about anything you throw at it. User community is...well, Adobe.
Storyline - Learning curve fraction of the time to produce quality output. A little more time understanding the building block structure and variable programming, there's not much Storyline can't handle. The absolute model for any org in any industry to follow when it comes to managing and supporting a community.
In the end Thomas, there are questions regarding cost of license, features & benefits, known issues, etc. But...what do you get after the sale with those other authoring tools? With Storyline you get...well, us!
Allthough i do like SL2 a lot, i notice i switch to Lectora lately more and more. Mainly for a few reasons.
-Javascript ( esp. longer scripts ) is supported better - DIVs can have a class set, thus being able to access them easily from your JS ( in SL2 you first need to publish, then to inspect your html for the name of a DIV ..then you can target it, republish it and do your magic..thats way too cumbersome ) -Lectora Online allows multiple developers / designers working simulteanously on 1 project -Next version of Lectora will be responsive.
31 Replies
I tested a LOT of different rapid e-learning tools before deciding on Storyline but I definitely don't regret my decision.
I think the good people at Articulate made a smart decision when they chose to make the UI of Storyline so similar to that of MS Office programs. It's definitely user friendly (assuming one knows Office) and allowed me to get up to speed very quickly. Now that I'm more experienced, I sometimes find that the Office-style UI forces me to do things in a certain way that may not be the most efficient way, but I'm willing to accept that trade off ... and even after using Storyline and Storyline 2 for a few years now, I'm still finding new things that I can do, so there's power under the hood, too.
In fact, one of the major reasons that I chose Storyline originally was its ease of use. My modus operandi at the time was to download a free trial of a tool and try to use it to build a particular e-learning module. Storyline was the only tool that allowed me to build the module without reading a manual or help file or searching the Internet for help.
In terms of performance, I haven't every really had an issue with Storyline or Storyline 2. It's perhaps not the platform you would choose for developing fast-moving games-based e-learning, but for most other uses, I'd say it's as good as anything on the market and better than most.
Hope this helps.
I just want to say that Storyline is not user friendly, easy to use, etc. I'm kidding :) It has the greatest user experience. Now softwares must have a powerfull user experience not just user interface. Maybe putting in client's shoes you will understand better. And not only the software is good, but also the community. Keep it on the right track guys. Thank you!
Hi Thomas!
All I can tell you is that after having purchased and used competing software I now will not use anything but Storyline 2. (Okay, okay... Storyline 1 too if a client hasn't upgraded just yet.)
It's simple enough to get up to speed quickly, but has capabilities deep and powerful enough to meet every client need (and for me, most every creative need) I could ask for.
The greatest things about Storyline 2 (and 1) Story View and Layers. Having used plenty of other tools for me it is these features that makes storyline stand out,making it super easy to create branched interactions and not be forced into the linear next, next, next thinking.
Getting up to speed is quick too, especially with the help of the Heroes community.
I use Articulate Storyline since the begining in France, and i find until now it is the best software for elearning. And since last year, i begun to work with both Storyline 1 and Storyline 2. It's very cool that Storyline 2 has the french and chinese version.
For me Storyline 2 is more powerful then 1, i had a course which contiens more than 500 slides and i must publish it into two part because it's too big and Storyline 1 can not handle it. But with 2, the publish is easy and quick.
Then what i like the most is the animation, the limite of animation in 1 is a big pb for us. But the 2 provides us more options.
I have been on both sides of Storyline (support as a partner and development in my current role) and I must say that Storyline 2 is fantastic. Once you get past basic usability, you will soon be creating advanced functionality and actively looking for new ways to address challenges.
The community here is also fantastic, with a range of help and resources.
Give the trial a go!
Great thread Tom! Love seeing all of this feedback ;)
I have been using Storyline since the early SL1 days. It is, in my opinion, the best elearning development product out there for ease of use and customization. This may sound cheesy, but I have found that with Storyline, your creativity is never limited by the tool. You imagine what you want, and Storyline basically does the heavy lifting for you via Triggers, Object States, and Layers. Articulate has essentially designed the tool to be developer friendly, while at the same time giving the developer some very powerful options which he or she can learn to take training to a whole new level of interactivity. In addition to the tool, Articulate also provides an unprecedented level of support for their products, not the least of which is their content developer blogs, tips, free elearning books, and weekly challenges, which have been very helpful for me in designing more effective training.
It looks and feels much like Power Point on steroids having a baby with the good old versions of Movie Maker, so it's almost instantly graspable by anyone.
Thomas:
First, welcome to the community. E-Learning Heroes is, to me, what puts Articulate ahead of everyone else. If I'm stuck on a project, I can come here and find solutions either through previous threads, or by starting a new thread. Everyone here, including the staff, are extremely helpful. Plus, there are weekly challenges that will not only help you build your development skills with Storyline, but also allows you to see what great creations others are coming up with.
I currently use Storyline 2 and my favorite function is probably the "States". With the amount of work you can do with the states, you can take 4 slides, for example, and condense them into 1 slide, and it's interactive for the user. Plus, with the pre-built states that come with Articulate, you do not have to add any additional triggers.
As others have mentioned, it has a similar look/feel to the Microsoft Office products, so you can pick it up really quick. I would suggest also subscribing to Articulate's YouTube channel because they have some great demos out there on how to perform different functions with Storyline.
Download the free trial and give it a shot! Stop back and let us know what you think.
Rick
Storyline is the BEST tool ever. It is simple to use and user-friendly. You can create great and superb courses from it. No tool can be compared with this.
I started working on Storyline three months back and now I have a Storyline 2 license in which I have finished up working on two long e-learning modules. Previously, I have worked in Outstart LCMS (Force10), Lectora and Captivate, but still I can say that by far with limited technical knowledge Storyline is indeed the tool you can bank on. Several features including Triggers, States, MotionPath etc. make it the best tool. Interestingly, if one knows PowerPoint, it's pretty much each to work on Storyline and of course with just few hours practice on other functionalities. However, it's up to your visualization that makes your e-learning modules different from others, and using Storyline for those many powerful interactions is just amazing.
Thanks Deepak and Sajna for sharing your thoughts here - hopefully the reviews help others who come across this thread in addition to Thomas!
I've been using Storyline for the last 2 years and love the program. Although there is a bit of a learning curve depending on the complexity of your training package, it is a great program. However, and this is important for new user, if you're going to change computer, be very careful. I was running SL2 on a 3 year old computer and recently upgraded to a new faster computer. All transfers were performed by our IT department. To accommodate the transfer, I had to deactivate all my Articulate products.
Unfortunately, SL1 and 2 changed the file extensions of all my training programs and left them unusable. I have been in contact with SL support (who by the way are great as well) but to no avail since they had no solution for the problem. I should mention that there was no warning that this would occur before I completed the deactivation of the software.
The end result is I probably have over 1,000 hours of development time that is down the proverbial toilet! That's a learning curve I hope that no one else has to experience. In the meantime, I'll re-develop the courses!
Coming from over 15 years of being a novice and professional Flash developer I am delighted by the ease at which SL2 allows you to do a lot of general animated tasks much more quickly than was possible in Flash. I miss the detailed animation I used to be able to do with Flash. And even though I know I can import Flash files into SL2 our company prefers we not use Flash even if HTML5 isn't called for.
More so, after developing with a few other elearning development tools in the last 4 years, I have to say that SL2 has been the most pleasant to develop in! I can point out a bunch of things that have become extremely time saving! I'm not fussing with HTML5 testing anymore to see if the slides I have developed will work in all the major browsers. Interactions don't break as they have in other elearning development tools. I don't have to waste time setting up code to reset an interaction. Image resizing and object swapping is way faster than anything else I've used. State duplication with the format painter tool over multiple objects saves so much time. And much much more!
The biggest difference overall is that I'm back to spending much more of my time doing what I enjoy about elearning (since Apple screwed up everything by deciding not to support Flash on the iphone). I'm back to creating engaging interactions that make me feel good about what I do in my profession!
Can't wait to see what new features SL3 has!!!!
I have been using Articulate Storyline 2 now for a few months, to create e-learning courses on CRM software for a global telecommunications company. Before this, I worked for a while with Articulate Studio, but since our company has standardized to Storyline 2, I am a big fan of Storyline.
I started with E-learning in 1998 when working for a pan-European telecommunications company, creating an ‘Online Learning Centre', hosted on the Intranet, featuring a few online introduction courses about products and services. I used Microsoft FrontPage, PowerPoint for illustrations and a simple program (QuizPlease) for multiple choice quizzes. That implied a lot of old fashioned 'handwork' to get it all together, but it worked fine, and my target audience (European sales managers) could take online courses as a preparation for a live workshop at HQ.
Now working with Articulate Storyline, I appreciate the rich functionality (triggers, layers, states, screen-casts in view, try & test mode, import audio files, ease of editing, etc. etc.) and the fact that I can create a complete e-learning course with a single program, based on a PowerPoint presentation. With my next step, applying Text-to-Speech software for creating voice overs, I have everything I need to create compelling and engaging e-learning courses, right from behind my computer. Amazing.
This post was removed by the author
Hi Tom,
I have developed in both Captivate, Lectora and Storyline 1 and 2. I think Captivate gives the most power, but your creativity will work with a lot more technical problem solving and fidgeting. I base my experience on working with Captivate 4-7.
Storyline 2 does indeed allow you to be rather creative quickly. The States of images and the well thought out Trigger system allows you to build some quite nice stuff.
In my own work, I managed to move from director / ID to pure developer, because in the old days I used to have a Flash developer do my Fancy Stuff for me in Captivate. Now I do almost all of it myself in Storyline 2.
Tom, you just cannot go wrong with SL. I've been doing this for 15 years, have used Toolbook (back in the day), Flash-only dev, etc. SL is the most intuitive and powerful tool I've ever owned in terms of elearning authoring. For this last project, I got two student workers up to speed in SL dev in a week's time. Keep posting!
Does anyone remember Macromedia Studio? Ha! Those were the days. (I sound like one of those parents who lecture their kids about how many miles they had to walk to school every day.)
I love the capabilities of Articulate Storyline. However, I do wish it could do a few things, like let you change the format of a question, drag and drop pages to organize your Story View, show you unused files in your project (to keep file size down), and offer more space in Articulate Tempshare for bigger projects.
These forums are the best! Hearing opinions and ideas from other elearning designers and developers challenges me to keep improving.
I've been very happy with the entire Articulate suite of authoring tools. I've been doing eLearning since 2002 and have used everything from Dreamweaver/Flash, Lectora, Captivate (which used to be RoboDemo, used that too), Trainersoft, OutStart LCMS, etc. etc.
Storyline, in my opinion, does a great job of making the more advanced features of the tools easily accessible from a workflow point of view, allowing designer/developers to create very robust content in less time.
I've done some Storyline workshops here where I work and almost everytime there area few Captivate users in the audience. My question to them is always, "How long would it have taken to build this exact same thing in Captivate?" The response is always "A lot longer, much longer".
SL2 is pretty easy to use, you can customize and build something relatively quick, compared to other tools out there. It's straight forward and that's the beauty of it - similar to MS Office style with the ribbon and right clicking objects. That's definitly the appeal for me, along with the articulate community.
There are some issues though, like some components not working in FF in HTML5... but they work in Flash and other browsers and the fact that it doesn't support responsive design. I'm hoping SL3 would have that fixed :) other than that, it's great
Hi Thomas,
Echoing all that everyone has already said! My experience started with a proprietary LMS authoring environment. From there moved to Lectora. Next was Captivate. Then Articulate Studio '09, and finally settling on Storyline.
Not having experience with all authoring tools on the market other than a free trail test here and there, I have used the big three (Lectora, Captivate, Storyline) in real-world projects.
I run a company now that specializes in custom designed elearning that is solely dependent on Storyline as the chosen main authoring tool. If the fate of my utility bills getting paid is a sign of comfort, reviewing this tool against the others for selection in your organization is hands down the best choice.
Why?
Lectora - it's roots are in HTML and has a powerful ability to program via "actions" and has supported Javascript for a long time. Biggest learning curve of all. Good user community.
Captivate - it's roots are in screen casting and has evolved into an elearning development tool. Too buggy for me (still), learning curve is...well, Adobe. Yet it can handle just about anything you throw at it. User community is...well, Adobe.
Storyline - Learning curve fraction of the time to produce quality output. A little more time understanding the building block structure and variable programming, there's not much Storyline can't handle. The absolute model for any org in any industry to follow when it comes to managing and supporting a community.
In the end Thomas, there are questions regarding cost of license, features & benefits, known issues, etc. But...what do you get after the sale with those other authoring tools? With Storyline you get...well, us!
SOLD!
Super Heroes for the win Kevin! We value your input :)
Allthough i do like SL2 a lot, i notice i switch to Lectora lately more and more. Mainly for a few reasons.
-Javascript ( esp. longer scripts ) is supported better
- DIVs can have a class set, thus being able to access them easily from your JS ( in SL2 you first need to publish, then to inspect your html for the name of a DIV ..then you can target it, republish it and do your magic..thats way too cumbersome )
-Lectora Online allows multiple developers / designers working simulteanously on 1 project
-Next version of Lectora will be responsive.
This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.