Software Simulations
Dec 03, 2015
Hello all,
I have been a long time user of Captivate (last version used 8.0) to build and produce technical training. I have used Studio 9 and SL1 previously for non- technical content and both have been great tools. I've been using SL2 for the last two months. Currently, I am building a tutorial with four modules on Oracle software. I have scoured the blogs and have not found one true software simulation that shows a step by step procedure. Am not interested in using screenshots with markers to teach software (I work at a financial institution where demos and practice is key). I find there are many limitations with using SL2. Here's some of the situations I've encountered. I had to alter most of the captions to provide proper instruction. The view mode does not stop if you have inserted additional text captions that the learner needs to read (there isn't enough time). Therefore, I inserted hotspots/triggers and removed the "pre-produced" animation which automatically advances the slide. I ended up customizing the view mode and taking a hybrid approach View/Try it. This way the learner has time to read the captions and an opportunity to be engaged at the same time. This may have not been as much of an issue if there was audio, however without audio less development time is needed and it's easier to update in the future. When you need to customize all of the screens to add zooming (not to mention you cannot copy and paste the zoom from one screen to another for consistency purposes), it's time consuming. Using the Fine Tuning doesn't always work when you need to find a "clean capture" point. It's really not a single screenshot, it's a video capture within a video capture. I rerecorded the sequence and made sure I moved through the steps slower to allow for enough video to fine tune. Truly, there has been a lot of rework and I'd might as well have started with a blank canvas using Captivate. SL2 is supposed to be a rapid building tool but in this case not so much. SL2 is what I have to work with to produce a quality product. Once again, using the tool to build the non-technical content for the tutorial has worked out fine.
I guess what I'm asking is has anyone used SL2 to build a comprehensive software simulations in view and try it modes with no audio? I'm curious to see examples.
BTW - I have submitted feature requests.
Thank you.
1 Reply
Hi,
We recently started a project that consists of view and try it's for a series of software demos that needed to be created from mp4 video. We were experimenting with both SL2 and Captivate. And there wasn't going to be audio added until well after the simulations were created.
Our biggest concern was the try it courses, as we knew they were going to have captions and buttons mostly, with the occasional text entry field the user would need to enter text into. We didn't know how well that would translate capturing from an mp4 video. We tested with a YouTube video we downloaded and did simulation captures with both SL2 and Captivate. We decided to try to capture the video and clicking on the spots in the video that the person who made the video had clicked. We got the following results:
In Captivate 9 we tried recording a simulation and had some major issues with the way it was capturing things. It was capturing screen shots of the video, so any part of the video that was actors, animation or panning looked like a web cam from the early 90's (stuttering delay). Also when it would break the simulation into slides, as you would click (like we wanted it to), it would put the button on a slide prior to the slide it needed to be on (most of the time). We could have used it, but it would have been a ton of work to correctly construct it from what Captivate was spitting out. There were also slides that had an extremely large quantity of images that were generated. This made it difficult to understand what was what in the slide if you needed to edit things.
In SL2 we did the same thing as far as capturing the mp4 as a simulation goes. It's output was video that was divided by slides from each click we made on top of the video demo. Because it used video as opposed to screen shots, the simulation looked great. This also added a button in the spots we clicked but we did not have the issue of the button being on the wrong slide.
Everything was pointing to us recommending to our client that we use SL2. To our dismay the client contacted us the next day telling us we needed to use Captivate 9 for the try it's. =(
My examples aren't online, as we never got as far as uploading them with our trials, or I would share them. But in my opinion, SL2 allows you to do most things Captivate does (and things Captivate doesn't do) in less time once you really get to know the 2 programs enough.
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