Preventing the course from advancing until something happens
Jul 17, 2014
Hey Community -- I hope you can help me out with something.
I have some recurring "tips" built in to the course. If you click on the tip button, the layer with the tip information will display. However, for the first instance of the tip, I want to call attention to it before they move on in the course by adding something that says:
"Hey, I noticed you didn't look at the tip. Did you know you can reveal tips by pressing the button?"
Once they dismiss that notice or look at the tip, they can click the Next button and move forward in the course. Of course, if they had looked at the tip, then they could move forward.
Any ideas on how to implement that?
(I'm not currently using on screen navigation -- just using the default PREV/NEXT buttons in the player template.)
4 Replies
Have a look at the attached file and see if that's what you want. On slide 2, I added conditions to both Prev and Next buttons that only jump to another slide if a True/False variable is true. This variable starts out as False and is set to True when the Tiplayer is closed.
Okay, two issues: The user experience, and the technical way to implement it.
First issue: Considering the End User
What should a "reminder" popup look like? It needs to help the people who didn't realize X, and it can't annoy the people who did know or don't care about X.
Personally, I dislike interruptions to the flow of a presentation. Say I have a marker with supplemental information. Now, if the information is genuinely optional, learners should be allowed to skip it without the computer chiding them. If the information is so important that I want to interrupt people who tried to skip it, then the information shouldn't be in a marker; the full text should appear as part of the slide's main timeline.
Of course, you want to make sure people skipping stuff at least *know* that they *can* find additional info in the marker. For this sort of issue, in the course I'm working on, I put some "Helpful User Interface Tips" on one slide at the beginning of the presentation. See this thread for details: http://community.articulate.com/forums/t/52727.aspx
Second issue: The technical side
Popup interruptions do make sense sometimes (I LIKE when programs ask if I really meant to hit "delete" on an entire layer, for example). If a popup genuinely makes sense, Michael Hinze's example should put you on the right track. I'd personally do some kind of "Proceed Anyway", "Cancel", "Don't show me this again" button set (where the "Don't show me..." is a checkbox), but the basic concept is the same.
Anyway, does that put you on the right track to sort this out?
Hey Michael -- thanks for the reply! I thought your solution was clever and a nice introduction into variables, which I haven't often used in Storyline. I managed to implement it into my course with no problems.
I just wish there was a way to change the variable from False to True when the TipLayer layer displays and not when that TipLayer layer is hidden. Do you know if that's possible?
Hi Andrew, you could remove the trigger from the 'X' button and instead add a trigger to the slide layer that changes the variable to true when the layer's timeline starts.
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