Hot Spots - I can click anywhere and incorrect answer

Hi Laura,

I played around with it a little, and it seems that is the default behavior for Hot Spot quizzes. One option may be to switch from a single click to a double-click. I think the user would be less likely to double-click by accident. 

Another option would be to fiddle with your feedback layers:

• Give the student "unlimited" attempts
• Provide Feedback "by choice"
• Edit the Incorrect Feedback layer or Feedback Master so that it doesn't show up on the screen (Drag it off the slide in the Feedback Master)
• Create a new Feedback Master that you can use for individual Hotspot feedback. 

I'm just kind of throwing the idea out there. I don't know if it would work with your particular project. This is a bit of tricky problem, and I agree, the default behavior is a bit confusing for the student.

Hello Laura,

You may also want to consider switching the type of question to free form question (multiple choice or multiple answer) and use clear buttons.

Here is an example:

• create a free form multiple choice question
• place a screen shot on the slide
• create several shapes and place them on severs different areas
• make them all clear (no fill color and no border)
• Then edit the question and set up my correct answer or answers along with my distractors.

Hope that helps!

Thanks Julia and Pedro for the ideas. The default behavior does seem strange!

I tried the unlimited idea, Julia, and while it solves my immediate issue, it means that for answers that the person submits incorrectly, they get another chance. I'd like to avoid that.

So I may end up recreating a hotspot and using variables to score the quiz, although that's a lot of leg work. Shoot!

Thanks again,

Laura

Update: I've been playing around with it for a while this morning, and it looks like if I convert them all to "Pick One" then the user can only click on the objects selected.

I'm going to update across the project and double-test it, but hopefully this works!

Laura, that sounds like the best solution yet. I hope it's working out.

Thanks Laura for the update, and I'm glad you found something that worked for you. 

Laura,

You can also get creative with the pick one and pick many free form quizzes.  You can set up many different distractors if a hotspot quiz isn't working out for you using clear objects or clear buttons.

You can really fancy (if you choose) by coupling variables to a series of clickable objects or buttons (visible or invisible) to enforce a sequence!

I know this was posted quite a while ago; however, I just came across it as I was having the same problem.  I wanted to create a hotspot question in Storyline but unfortunately it allowed the user to click anywhere on the screen - and counted that against them in the number of attempts submitted.

MY SOLUTION:
I created a new hotspot over the areas on the screen that I did not want included in the hotspot submission.  When the user clicked that hotspot I triggered a layer to appear with a basic pop up that said, "Please click the buttons on the right."  Obviously you would customize the pop up to direct the user to wherever it is you need to direct them.  Then, after the pop up appeared and the user clicked to close that layer, they would proceed to the actual hotspot quiz question.

I hope this all makes sense and helps any future developers having the same problem.

Thanks for popping in to share your findings and solution Russell. It could certainly assist someone else that runs across this thread in the future.

A bit late to the table here, but I too wrestled with this bad default behavior that is built into storyline for hotspot questions, even after all these years.

Russell's suggestion above does work, but the problem is then the fact that storyline counts each click as an attempted answer, therefor it will count it as an incorrect attempt as before.

The solution I have found is to implement the large hotspot covering the whole slide, but place it just underneath the other hotspots on the timeline, and add a trigger to the base slide to show the custom layer created to tell users that they must click an answer. This way, if a user clicks outside of an answer hotspot, they would then click the big one which then displays the custom layer telling users that they must click an answer to proceed.

To prevent the screwy default behavior of storyline counting a click outside of an answer hotspot, you then have to implement a number variable on the Try Again layer set to add 1 each time, and then another trigger to show the Incorrect layer when the count has reached the limit you set for the question retries. In addition to this, you must also set a trigger on the custom layer set to Jump to Slide - This Slide, and oh, you also have to set the base slide to "Reset to Initial State".

Oh, one more thing. You may just have to set the correct hotspot to show the correct layer anyway, because, yeah..

Complex and time consuming, how well I know, but its what has worked for me to get the behavior out of storyline hotspot questions that I think most users would expect.

Or, you can just do a Convert to Freeform, Pick One, or Pick Many, which works very well and is what I went with after wrestling Storyline for a while.

Hotspot convert to freeform should be removed or its behavior fixed.