When Revisiting: Reset to Initial State

I try to be deliberate in the When Revisiting setting I choose, yes. Some triggers, especially ones that fire "When the Timeline Starts on This Slide" will still trigger even if the slide is set to Resume Saved State, but not every trigger. Conceptually, use "Reset to Initial State" to have every visit to the slide essentially refresh everything, and use "Resume Saved State" when you more or less want the learner to resume the slide where they left off.

I was just helping someone else in another thread here a few days ago where their Previous Slide button didn't seem to them to work, but the solution ended up being to change their When Revisiting because a bunch of their slides paused the slide in the middle of the timeline and had triggers that jumped learners to a different slide "When the Timeline Ends."

Well, since the Saved State (how the learner had left it) included the Timeline being ended, that's what resuming meant when they pressed the Previous button: that as soon as the slide loaded, the trigger fired to send them somewhere else. The slide couldn't pause like it had done the first time they'd visited the slide because the timeline's playhead was already past that point. Thus the solution was to change the slide to "Reset to Initial State" so that the revisited slide could start over and pause once more, giving the user a chance to interact with it before that "When the Timeline Ends" trigger came up.

Are you able to share a .story file we can investigate? If triggers are hiding images or the images are "running out" as the timeline transpires, then those will remain hidden when the learner revisits the slide since that's the saved state they're resuming. 

If the interaction works in Preview, Review, the SCORM CLOUD, and for most users of the LMS, but doesn't work the first time for some users, there may be something in their browser or security settings interfering with the course.  

From what I've seen, a common issue with learners getting stuck when revisiting interactive slides is that the slides have a "when the timeline starts on this slide" trigger. A “when timeline starts” triggers runs every time the user reaches the slide—even if the Slide Properties are set to “Resume saved state.” If you don’t want the trigger to run in some situations, you need to add conditions to the trigger.

A can't-proceed problem might also occur if an important trigger's "when" might happen the first time the user visits the slide and completes the interaction, but it doesn't happen when revisiting. One example: something happens when a T/F variable changes. Another trigger changes the variable to True. But once that variable is True, rerunning a trigger that changes it to True doesn't actually change the value. 

In short, an interaction's might work the first time but not on subsequent visits.

 

Here's what I recommend for the “When revisiting” setting in Slide Properties:

Keep "Automatically decide" for graded-question slides. Storyline will know whether to reset the slide (when the user needs to answer the question) or resume it (when reviewing).

For other slides, change the setting to ensure it does what you want. 

• Use "Reset to Initial State" if you want all the objects to revert to their Initial state and to replay the Timeline from the beginning.

• Use "Resume Saved State" if you want the objects to maintain their last state and to resume the Timeline where it left off. If the Timeline ended during the last visit, nothing replays.  As noted above, though, a "when timeline starts on this slide" trigger will still run. 

 

FYI: According to the User Guide, this is how Storyline "automatically decides" what to do when revisiting:

• If the slide has only simple objects—text, images, audio, video, etc—but no interactivity, Storyline 360 resets the slide to the beginning of its timeline.
• If the slide contains interactive elements, such as buttons or other objects that have a visited/selected state, Storyline 360 resumes the slide where it left off previously.