Hot Spots - I can click anywhere and incorrect answer

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.