Disable Next Button on a Slide until all Buttons are Visited

Just wanted to chime in here for any future users who are desperately trying to make this work like I was only a few moments ago.

In storyline360 you might not need to use variables at all.
I don't fully understand them yet and I was getting a weird thing when if I left the slide and went back to it sometimes the next button was greyed out and sometimes it wasn't, it was very frustrating.

My slide had three panels I wanted learners to click and read the information that came up in the layer that opened before moving on.

All I did was:

1. Set a trigger to change state of next button to disabled when timeline starts on this slide

2. Create a visited state for my panels and set a trigger for that (change state of rectangle to visited when user clicks on it)

3. Set a trigger to change state of next button to normal once all rectangles (the panels) had changed their state to visited.

This works like a charm but it does have a few limitations.
You must make sure you slide is set to reset to initial state when revisiting (or else the next button will always disable because of the first trigger) which means your learners will have to interact with your objects every single time which can be frustrating too. And, this works for things where you can trigger something due to a change in state, with more complex interactions you might have to find one more workaround on top of this.

Anyway, just thought I would put this out there in case anyone needed it!

Hi Benedict,

Here is another way you can do the same like Wendy did. The only difference is, you will see the visited/completed state after visiting the branching/inner slides. Attached is the Story file for your reference.

Place this trigger on the layers, as one of the actions when the Return to Menu object is clicked.

If the layers can be visited at random, you need to place it on each layer, otherwise, just the last one.

Without the file, I have no ideas about the audio file. If you could sanitize it, you could attach that slide here.

Thanks James for sharing those steps here! Sounds similar to another example we've documented here for Storyline 2. 

Hello. I've used triggers like in the example you posted, Ashley, to set the Next button to not appear until the timeline reaches the end. This seemed to work fine, but I recently found out that if you hit the Enter button, it advances the slide without having to click the Next button. Also, when viewing on a tablet, the user can just swipe ahead before the Next button appears. Is there a way to disable this functionality so the slide can only be advanced by clicking Next when the button appears? I have searched the forums everywhere and can find out how to do this? thanks.

Hello Jeremy and welcome to E-Learning Heroes :)

This is actually an open issue that our team is currently investigating:

Player navigation does not work as expected when you press spacebar or Enter key after the first slide if the Next Button is set to hidden when timeline starts

I'm going to add this conversation to the report as we track user impact and so that we can update you here when we can as well.

No known workaround is listed at this time.

Thank You Leslie! This is a major issue for us because some of our end users are paid for their time spent completing courses. Also, if they are able to repeatedly hit Enter and skip through an entire course in 2 minutes when it’s supposed to be a 45 minute course, it’s a compliance issue as well. Hopefully a workaround or setting that prevents users from skipping ahead will be added or included in a software update soon. I hope we don’t have to redesign all of our courses or go back to using Adobe Captivate because of this loophole. Currently using Storyline 360.

This is great; however, the problem I've had is that when the learner returns to the slide by clicking the Previous button, the Next button doesn't appear and they have to re-click all the buttons again to get it to re-display. I tried setting the slide properties to "Resume saved state," but it still doesn't work. 

Hi Thomas!

I'm happy to investigate! Would you mind sharing your file so that we can see which triggers you've already created?

You can do so by using the "add attachment" button in this discussion. Or you can share the file privately with our Support Engineers by using this link.

I followed these instructions on Storyline 3 and it worked.  Thank you so much for posting!!!