Temporarily disabling Next button

Helen;

There are a couple of ways you can do this and it depends on your comfort with the software.

You can use the visited states of the buttons you use to go to the layers.  Put a trigger on the next button that says basically jump to slide "X"  on condition that the state of all of your buttons are visited.  You may put in another layer that says "you must view all layers prior to moving on" or something and have a separate trigger that goes to that layer if the buttons are not visited yet.

That is the way I would go with this.  Let me know if you need more clarification on this.

Tim

You can insert a custom next button, set the initial state to "disabled," and have a trigger change the state to "normal" when the conditions are met that every slide layer is visited (You'll probably either need to use variables or button states to accomplish this). If you need more info, I can probably post a quick example. Just let me know.

Thanks Tim and Rebekah

I think I tried something similar to this.  The problem I had is that as soon as I clicked on the last button it automatically advanced to the next slide without me clicking on Next.

I will give it another try.

Hi Helen! Glad that Tim and Rebekah were able to jump in here and help you out.  Just let us know how the suggestions work and if you need anything further.

I think you might be using the "next" button on the player, am I right? For the functionality you want, you'll need to create your own custom next button on the slide itself. I just did this in a course, hopefully these screen shots help. So as I mentioned, your next button should have an initial state of disabled (or inactive if you want to create your own custom state). Then have a trigger change the state to normal per below.

Now, if you use the built in disabled button state, this should be all you need. The button will only function when the conditions above are met. However, if you create your own custom state (such as inactive), like I did (I wanted to have a hover functionality, which you can't do if it is disabled), you'll need another step, see below. If you don't do that step, your learner will be able to click on the button and advance even if it is not "normal."

You may find it helpful to read through my recent forum thread on this topic: http://community.articulate.com/forums/t/34716.aspx

Good luck!

Also, I used a custom "complete" state instead of the "visited" state, for some other reasons. So in the first screen shot, just replace complete with visited.

Great tips Rebekah! Thanks.

Hi,

If you like, you can use the articulate next button and accomplish the same thing. I attached a copy of my approach that I got from this forum somewhere. There is a caption with an initial state of hidden that shows when the learner clicks the articulate next button without having clicked on the items on the slide yet. It has a little close button as well. Then you add a trigger that allows the next button to go to the next slide only if all the items on your slide have visited states. You also need to remove the "jump to next slide when user clicks the next button" default trigger.

Thanks for sharing Gordon!

Good to know, Gordon! Thanks!

Hi Rebekah and Gordon

To save me having to create a custom 'Next' button, I have tried Gordon's suggestion and it works perfectly.

Thanks you very much for the advice both of you.

Glad to hear it Helen! Thanks for updating

It would be ideal to be able to control the visibility of the actual player next/prev buttons via triggers, but this is a great option. I'll be using this.

Thanks for sharing that with us here, Gordon! And thank you, Rebekah, for the custom next button info. What a fine community this is