Forum Discussion
Storyline 'Next' button state change not working for about 10% of my learners. Am at a loss.
Greetings fellow Articulians.
I've been experiencing a problem for about a year now, and it wasn't an issue previously so I'm wondering if it's an Articulate bug. The issue only happens with about 10% of my learners, and there's no common theme like 'they are all on mobile devices' or 'they are all using Chrome' - it's totally random in terms of their learning environments.
The issue happens in a custom interaction, where a learner needs to click some buttons to trigger layer views, and I hide the Next button until they have viewed all the layers. The issue is the 'Next' button doesn't always re-appear after viewing all the slide layers/buttons.
You can see in the attached Storyline examples, I've tried consolidating all my triggers onto the master layer, I've tried using the triggers on the slide layers instead, but no matter what combination, it ends up working for me when testing, but about 10% of my 13,000 learners end up getting stuck in these interactions, so you can imagine the support calls I get. The issue has been happening in multiple courses I developed, basically any Slide where I have a custom built interaction like this.
I've attached a video of the same exact interaction I have in the uploaded Storyline file attachment, showing what happens when it doesn't work (when I logged in as a user and attempted to continue the course for them). The odd thing is, when a learner gets stuck in the interaction, and I log in as them and resume the course where they left off, I experience the same issue. But if I completely restart the course rather than resume, still logged in as them... I don't experience the issue.
I could always just scrap the idea of hiding the next button and have it displayed the whole time, but then someone can (and probably will) just jump past the slide without looking at all the elements.
I've attached the Storyline file the video correlates to, plus two other Storyline files where I use the Master Layer, and I use the Slide Layers, to control the triggers. The issue happens no matter which way I configure this.
Hi Mike,
I'm not sure I have an answer for you, but I have looked at a couple of your projects and have a thought.
Your trigger for making the Next button visible appears to be based on when a variable changes. If I am not mistaken, the trigger may never occur (get activated) unless the variable changes on the same layer as the trigger. For example, in your Corkboard project, you have triggers on the base layer to have the Next button become visible when a variable changes, however, the triggers to have the variable change are not on the base layer. Therefore, I am not sure the triggers for the Next button on the base layer are really doing anything, because they only trigger when the variable changes and the variable does not change on the base layer.
I would recommend trying to change the triggers to something else, such as "Make the Next button visible when the timeline starts on this layer (as opposed to when a variable changes), if the following variables are true, 1, 2, 3, etc. This might make the Next button visible based on an even that is sure to happen and not one that may not happen or could get countermanded by a trigger that comes before it.
I know you have tried changing the triggers to the base layer and the layers themselves, but what I would try is changing the triggers themselves to be dependent upon the timeline beginning, not on a variable changing.
Maybe this will help. Maybe not.
10% is high number, to me that suggests something wrong with the design or UI.
Why are you using variables instead of states for Next button issue 1, you could replace all the next button change triggers to one trigger using the visited state.
For Next Button issue 2 again I would use states.
The cork board I would change the state of the image instead of using variable.
I am not sure why it isn't working, because even this way it should work, my guess would be as you have no visible state change they are not stuck they just haven't pressed all of the markers.You could troubleshoot adding references to the variables, but all of these would work better using states.
