Have an interesting way of presenting controls?

Apr 18, 2012

It's becoming redundant in setting up the "controls page" and am looking at spicing it up a little bit. People expect the control page for our CBTs and somewhere stating whether the module has audio or not. Anyone have an interesting way of presenting both (controls and audio) or one or the other? Here is an idea that I came up with for the audio side of things (see image below). This would be the only thing on the slide and when they press the play button a sound will play and they can adjust their sound level accordingly. With that, it should hint to them, hey there is audio involved with this CBT. :P

7 Replies

Brian Duvall

12 years ago04/19/12 at 4:48 am (UTC)

For the last big course I did, I created a simple series of animations to alert the user that the course had audio (attached below, hit Page Down to begin animation). This did not include any sort of an audio test.

Like others, for player controls, I typical insert an Engage interaction as a tab that addresses the player controls and make some reference towards it in the beginning of the course.

course+audio+intro.ppt

Heather Beaudoin

12 years ago04/19/12 at 7:48 am (UTC)

Here's an example of how I've handled it in the past. The reason I use music on the first slide is so they're not missing any audio you expect them to hear before they adjust the volume and click Start.

http://www.articulate.com/blog/articulate-guru-honorable-mention-golf-match-play-by-heather-steckley/

David Steffek

12 years ago04/19/12 at 8:03 am (UTC)

Usually I just use a headphone image or the typical speaker icon along with text indicating that the course has audio. But then I've seen people wearing their headphones in courses that don't have audio, which causes me to wonder if I shouldn't including a "no audio" prompt in those courses.

Adam Truckenmiller
Author

12 years ago04/19/12 at 8:18 am (UTC)

Yea, I typically use the Labeled Graphic Engage interaction when creating the control page. Just was curious about if there were other interesting ideas out there. Thanks for the examples Heather and Brian. David we typically state whether the CBT has audio or not but it seems we still receive phone calls with people complaining they cannot hear the sound coming from a CBT (CBTs in which do NOT have sound).

I'm starting to rethink about the control page and see if maybe we should just place it as a tab instead of being one of the very first slides in the CBT but then maybe have a "test sound" slide towards the beginning so they know there is audio implemented.