Storyline 360 Text Styles: My Evaluative Experience so far...
Hi everyone:
I wanted to get some thoughts and feedback on people's experience and usage of the relatively new Text Styles feature of Storyline 360, first introduced in July 2020, patched in August 2020, and expanded in December 2020 to include Customized Styles.
In early February, 2021, our department decided to evaluate this feature, to see if it could be used in a few specific projects, the implied caveat being, we weren't going to bet the farm on this if it caused more problems than it solved.
While I applaud Articulate for moving the Storyline 360 Editor in this direction (frankly, this feature should have been added YEARS ago!), it does potentially come with a few drawbacks, namely:
The project could get confused as to which slides and layouts have styles, and which ones don't. This is currently our most significant issue with this feature.
Slides with prevailing layouts that have custom styles added to them ALL can access the new styles as expected, which is great!
This is what I'm sure everyone WANTS.
Here's problem #1: Slides that are NOT the dominant layout(s) DON'T have access to these newly added customized styles where they have been added or applied.
I am guessing/assuming we'd have to create customized styles MANUALLY for EVERY SINGLE project layout, which is not what I'd call a "positive" feeling.
I'd like to think the primary goal of using Text Styles is to do THREE things:
- Ensure that the visual appearance of text and layouts are consistent.
- Ensure ALL slides have access to any / all Text Styles created in-project.
- Ensure font faces & sizes DON'T unilaterally change for no good reason.
I've tried a few potential work-arounds for this, including changing layouts and modifying the Master Slides of layouts that don't have access to Customized Styles, with no success.
In theory, once Text Styles are added to a Storyline 360 project, the expected/ideal(?) scenario would be to make them universally accessible / available to ALL other project slides, regardless of their layout usage.
In other words, I'd really like to see some potential movement on goal #2.
I also would like to say I do see Storyline 360 occasionally change selected content to the WRONG style from time to time, but it seems to recover fairly well using Undo and a few other approaches. I am making the educated guess that this aspect has likely been improved in recent builds.
Thoughts/comments/feedback not only welcome, but encouraged.
Thanks,
-Mark Shepherd, e-Learning Developer, Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) - Ottawa, Canada
mshepherd@cihi.ca