Navigation

Mar 03, 2011

Hi All,

I put a course of mine out to be reviewed for feedback and I came across a small issue. One of the reviewers was an older lady who wasn't very computer savy. Though she liked the design of the course she had issues with my navigation. I had used navigation icons on the bottom of the screen including forward/back/home buttons etc as I was using slide only mode with no controller bar. She said she found it confusing to change between this navigation on the bottom and the navigation buttons on engage activities at the top. I was wondering if anyone else had encountered this or had any ideas.

Thanks,

Kat

6 Replies
Joe Deegan

Hi Kat,

I have run into this problem but unfortunately I haven't found a great solution.  What I ended up doing is adding reminders that pop up pointing to where they should click to continue.  The ideal solution would be using shapes that hyperlink within the interaction but that's not possible.  I lean towards using the Articulate player controls for navigation but that still doesn't avoid the problem of navigating in Engage interactions.  Curious to hear if others have solutions other than adding reminders that point to where to click.

David Anderson

Hi Kat,

 

Sure, this comes up once in a while – but not often. I’m curious, was this her first course that included Engage interactions?

 

Tracy and Jade put some great examples together on how to navigate courses. Maybe something similar would work for your group?

 

Once I had a  sr. bigwig complain about user confusion with interaction navigation within course navigation. I showed him the design templates the team used. We used Engage along with some other custom interaction templates.

 

I then asked him to find a few things on our corporate intranet site The site had iframes, widgets, info pods, tabbed pods, andvideos and more – it was well-done considering how much info was packed on the home page. What's more, each division used the same corporate web template with their own pods, tabs and so on.

 

That went a long way and we didn't hear any more about it. Not sure that's helpful to your situation, but I remember my experience with it

Kat Fardian

Hey guys,

In answer to your question, yes it was her first online course she's ever seen. It was a group of people from the community who have content knowledge but no understanding of e-learning. Also it seems here in Australia there aren't a lot of people using Articulate in the community sector so not many people have had experience with engage interactions.

Thanks for the links. I'll check them out!

Kat

Chris Fletcher

Loads of people have mentioned this to me in my company, and in the one I worked in before. I think as long as you're clear about it in your instructions, and introductions in those slides, it shouldn't be a problem.

I always used to say "Well it means they have to be paying attentino and can't just click through everything quickly and pretend they're doing the training" but I'm not sure I feel that way anymore. It can be confusing at times, even frustrating if you don't understand how to move things on.

I've actually just decided this week after 'forum trawling', that the best solution is to insert the engage interactions as flash/web objects so that the player controls are still at the bottom, and the engage bits work independently. They can be reduced in size to fit into your slides as part of the slide instead of as a slide in their own right. This means no "Next Slide" button, and the navigation at the top of the interaction is independent to the navigation controls.

All in all, it looks better, and makes it easier to navigate - in my opinion

Kat Fardian

Hey Chris,

I like that idea. I assume it takes a bit more work but it might be worth the effort. I have seen the screenr where you insert as a web object and align it so that the title bar sits off the top of the page. But I had totally forgotten about it till now. Might be worth a try. I've just experimented with a design where my normal powerpoint slides to look like the engage slides with the bar up the top and the grey box below. Then played with the background to make it interesting. I might takea mock up of both to management and let them choose.

Thanks for the great idea!

Kat

Simon Perkins

Chris, sounds like you're publishing your Engage interactions as SWFs and then moving across the relevant files/folders into /data?  Is that correct?  That's what I've been doing on a recent course (because of nav issues) - works fine, but is a pain every time you republish etc.

Kat, I'm having the same issue with a pilot group.  They "don't like" the fact that the course has hyperlink nav (because it has branching) mixed with QM "submit" buttons mixed with Engage "player controls".  I can see their point, but it can be frustrating.  

However, it's made me rethink the basis of my nav instructions.  I embed a tabbed USER GUIDE (Engage Media Tour) which highlights as many nav options as possible), and then re-iterate nav instructions on each Engage Introduction slide.  

My thinking is that some people will pick up what to do intuitively (and pass over the instructions without feeling dumbed down) while others will need to read everything every time.  Just that nature of learners I guess ...

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