To Animate or Not to Animate (in Presenter)

Thanks for sharing this David. I've had this same conversation with myself but never got as far as testing the size differences.

For me it seems to be a personal preference unless you will be using your slides in any other format besides as a published course. For example, if you will ever share it as a PDF or via a site like Slideshare you'll need to split them into separate slides anyway since those do not display animations. For some reason, it seems that somebody somewhere always wants a PDF copy so that's the way I've been leaning lately.

For what it's worth...if not for that I think I prefer to build them as animations on the same slide.

Hi David,

Interesting experiment... thanks for sharing the results.

Another thing to consider is if you show a "slide count" to the learners in your course. Having multiple slides to accomplish a simple animation change might run the risk of intimidating some users.

I tend to agree with Mike, unless I need to break things up for printed purposes, I try to keep things on fewer slides.

Now once the new Presenter '12 supports PPT slide transitions too.... hmm. 

Bob

Mike & Bob:

I agree on the "keeping things on fewer slides" point.  I tend to try to do that too.  However, splitting slides up is a good thing to consider for those times when you need to print.  I hadn't thought of that aspect.  I was just curious about the animate vs. no animate comparison.

Thanks for your thoughts!

David

If we are truly building for e-learning, we want to make it user-friendly.  I have received complaints when there are 'too many slides' in the menu, even if they are truly very short slides.  Overall, I know people want it more interactive and interesting, which is often accomplished by many slides vs. fewer slides with lots of audio per page.  So--it takes extra time, but I tend to try to remove the 'extras' from the menu.  I have noticed some issues with removing some of them in the menu for bookmarking in our LMS, so do try to limit this (odd...haven't spent a lot of time looking into it though--note this is in Storyline, not Presenter that I have noticed this issue).

Kate I agree with keeping things user friendly, etc and that's a good point about managing what does & doesn't get into the left-hand navigation menu, etc.

I have to agree with Mike on this one. It really depends on two factors.

• Will you be sharing the content as a PDF or Slide Show
• The content will only be in the form of an Articulate project.

Regarding size; not sure how much animation will inflate the overall file size however there are a few things to take into consideration.

• clip art should be GIF
• Images should be JPEG or PNG
• Main Images / clipart should only be found on the Layouts under the slide master

I can only imaging the size of the file if a user forgot these small but critical points.

Regarding animation; if taken in moderation, animation is a good thing. However when over used it not only is detrimental to the learning process, but it can be flat out ANNOYING!!  My advice to is to use the K.I.S.S. principal and keep it simple silly.

Yes, James! The important thing is APPROPRIATE use of animation. Ruth Clark touches on the use of animation and graphics by saying that it's "...the communication functionality of the graphic that matters.

Here's a good article of hers that I've shared with a lot of people:

"More than Eye Candy"  http://www.clarktraining.com/content/articles/MoreThanEyeCandy_part1.pdf