Questions & Answers

Storyline is hard, y'all!

I am currently building a course and exclusively using Storyline for the first time. I'm not new to Storyline, and I consider myself in the intermediate bucket of proficiency. Normally, I use Rise and occasionally add Storyline blocks for interactive bits. But in this case, we have a lot of interactivity along with guided narration, so I felt that Storyline would be the best choice for authoring.

I've incorporated several techniques to help speed up the authoring process—slide templates, font and color themes, reusable interactive bits, slides with triggered sequences that are just a matter of changing a few variables here and there—and even then the process is extremely slow. Some days, depending on the slide's complexity, I can spend around 4 hours on a single slide.

Is this pretty par for the course? Or am I experiencing the wild inefficiency that's just part of being a newbie? I'm estimating it'll take me about a month and a half of development work for what was a 20-slide PPT deck 😨 Normally, a course with this kind of content in Rise would maybe take me a few weeks, but I feel that the concepts would land flat without the interaction. It's a somewhat complex topic on a digital lighting networking protocol. Rolls right off the tongue.