Storyline 360 Text Styles: My Evaluative Experience so far...

Feb 17, 2021

Hi everyone:

I wanted to get some thoughts and feedback on people's experience and usage of the relatively new Text Styles feature of Storyline 360, first introduced in July 2020, patched in August 2020, and expanded in December 2020 to include Customized Styles.

In early February, 2021, our department decided to evaluate this feature, to see if it could be used in a few specific projects, the implied caveat being, we weren't going to bet the farm on this if it caused more problems than it solved.

While I applaud Articulate for moving the Storyline 360 Editor in this direction (frankly, this feature should have been added YEARS ago!), it does potentially come with a few drawbacks, namely:

The project could get confused as to which slides and layouts have styles, and which ones don't. This is currently our most significant issue with this feature.

Slides with prevailing layouts that have custom styles added to them ALL can access the new styles as expected, which is great!

This is what I'm sure everyone WANTS.

Here's problem #1: Slides that are NOT the dominant layout(s) DON'T have access to these newly added customized styles where they have been added or applied.

I am guessing/assuming we'd have to create customized styles MANUALLY for EVERY SINGLE project layout, which is not what I'd call a "positive" feeling.

I'd like to think the primary goal of using Text Styles is to do THREE things:

Ensure that the visual appearance of text and layouts are consistent.
Ensure ALL slides have access to any / all Text Styles created in-project.
Ensure font faces & sizes DON'T unilaterally change for no good reason.

I've tried a few potential work-arounds for this, including changing layouts and modifying the Master Slides of layouts that don't have access to Customized Styles, with no success.

In theory, once Text Styles are added to a Storyline 360 project, the expected/ideal(?) scenario would be to make them universally accessible / available to ALL other project slides, regardless of their layout usage.

In other words, I'd really like to see some potential movement on goal #2.

I also would like to say I do see Storyline 360 occasionally change selected content to the WRONG style from time to time, but it seems to recover fairly well using Undo and a few other approaches. I am making the educated guess that this aspect has likely been improved in recent builds.

Thoughts/comments/feedback not only welcome, but encouraged.

Thanks,

-Mark Shepherd, e-Learning Developer, Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) - Ottawa, Canada
mshepherd@cihi.ca

3 Replies

Mark Shepherd
Author

3 years ago02/23/21 at 5:12 pm (UTC)

Hi Matthew:

Thanks for the reply/feedback. Like you, I get the distinct impression that Text Styles aren't being used a lot (as yet), either by Storyline 360 Developers.

However, maybe this Discussion Post might make things move along a little more quickly:

SL 360 SOLUTION: Access Customized Text Styles on Any/All Slides

Cheers,

-Mark

Mark Shepherd, e-Learning Developer, Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI)
Ottawa, Canada - mshepherd@cihi.ca

Terry Bell

almost 3 years ago05/12/21 at 2:16 pm (UTC)

Thanks Mark,

It's a shame that we have to do this much plotting and planning and testing to ensure that a new SL "feature" doesn't just mess up our existing modules. I was excited to learn that Articulate had implemented text styles, but I have to learn to temper my excitement because of course there are always drawbacks to new functionality. With Articulate, the drawback is usually that it's half thought-out and poorly designed, so something will break.

Carol Dungan

over 2 years ago10/02/21 at 1:48 am (UTC)

I come from a graphic design background and paragraph/character styles were just baseline. So I was really pumped when Articulate introduced this. I use them quite a bit, but the current frustration is similar to so many other things in Storyline... works better in theory than in practice. Lately, I'm experiencing paragraph styles overriding each other if they're in the same text box. But splitting heads and body text into separate text boxes would just negate any benefit.

It is a handy feature for making global changes to styles in a project, so you don't have to hunt down every instance. But if you import a slide from another project with the same-named styles but different attributes, it gets kind of dicey.

Agree with the above, so much of the improvements Articulate makes seem half-baked and not adequately tested before being rolled out. But hey, at least with this latest build we can disable the automatic scroll bars on overflow text.