Recommendations for a Visual Process Flow

May 11, 2012

Scott Kolts
By Scott Kolts

I would like to create a process flow that will always be visible to the user as they progress through the course. It would be a simple, horizontally-aligned flow chart that would reside near the top of the window to serve as a continual reminder of the user's location in the course. There would be a different process flow for each scene, and I would like the current slide highlighted in the flow chart. The user could click each step in the chart to navigate to the corresponding slide.

I'm looking for recommendations for how to create this type of flow chart. My initial thought is to create a different master slide for each scene (with the corresponding process flow at the top of the master). Is this how you would handle this? Also, what type of object would you use to hold the process flow (scrolling panel or something else)? What type of object would you use for each step in the flow (button, hotspot, other)?

4 Replies
Russell Still
almost 12 years ago05/11/12 at 2:34 pm (UTC)

I'm not the most creative person around here, but there are tons of easy ways to do it. I'm sure someone else will come up something a lot more clever. I'd probably take the brute force approach and put a progress bar or circle somewhere in the slide, and just show it further filled in for each successive slide. Go forward - it grows, go backward it shrinks.

Of course, this only works if you monitor progress at the slide level. If progress isn't based on slide breaks, I'd keep a numeric variable and increment it when a progress milestone occurs. In your master slide, the progress-meter (whatever it turns out to be) would be drawn based on the value of the variable.

I've asked for arrays as a product enhancement. If they also created a new kind of variable called an "object variable", you could show the appropriate progress meter graphic with one statement. In face, a new "layer variable" would also work nicely (i.e. the layer name would be a variable instead of a constant).

Scott Kolts
almost 12 years ago05/14/12 at 9:18 am (UTC)

Thanks for your suggestions Russ. Please let me know if you know of a good overview for how to set up monitoring progress?

This is my first foray into Articulate, so I've got quite a bit to learn, and I want to be sure Storyline can handle what I'm trying to do before actually purchasing it. Thanks for your help!

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