2nd Layer displays with base layer

SOLVED-

The “When user clicks” trigger is fired on mouse up, not on mouse down. So, if you click the mouse button down and hold it, nothing happens; once you unclick the mouse button, the trigger fires. That’s pretty standard web behavior—no issue there.

And in our case, that wouldn’t be an issue if the learner was using the NEXT button to advance the course; they’re clicking in the player, not on the slide. However, on some of our slides, the learner clicks an object on the slide to advance to the next slide. This is where our issue comes in: in our case, when we have two slides in a row that have the “When the user clicks outside [whatever object]” trigger, the second slide registers the mouse up from the previous slide’s mouse click.

That’s why the rogue Hint layer was appearing in our Storyline file. The “click outside” trigger was firing on the second slide, because the slide advanced from the first slide to the second slide in the split-second between the first slide’s mouse down and mouse up.

The way we resolved this was to add an extra layer (literally) in between the mouse down and the mouse up. On each slide that had the issue, we added a blank layer with no objects on it. The timeline is a quarter of a second, and we added a trigger to advance to the next slide when the timeline ends on this layer.

Then, on the base layer, we show the blank layer when the learner clicks the object we want them to click. This way, there’s a tiny stretch of time to account for the learner finishing their click before the slide advances, so they’re not still on mouse down when they get to the next slide. And we found that the extra quarter-second of “waiting” time isn’t noticeable.

We would still have an issue if a learner clicks their mouse and holds it down for longer than the quarter-second…so we might have to tweak the timing on that blank layer, but in general, I think it's a risk we can live with.