Best Practices for Storyline Player Controls

I always include the Play/Pause option - in today's world, you've got to have the option to pause. Life, including the workday is full of interruptions. I also add volume, captions and have recently begun including playback speed. 

Navigating and advancing slides differs for each course I create, so sometimes the learners get the autonomy of the next icon and sometimes they've just got to wait for the end of the slide. 

I was excited to use the full screen option, but it does not work in our LMS unfortunately. 

I did go through a phase where I was turning off all player controls and creating my own buttons within the slides themselves, with shapes or images and triggers. That was fun for flexing my creative muscles, but I tapered off, because I preferred going back to the player controls for learner familiarity and ease of use. 

It is interesting reading everyone's different preferences - and whys. And even on my own team of 3 IDs, we each have different preferences and thankfully not a mandate for standardization on that from leadership. 

For accessibility reasons, I generally use several of the controls: play/pause, CC if I have audio or video, the Seek Bar, playback speed, and full screen just to start.
I also leave the Seek Bar freely available all the time, since I give the user the freedom to skip ahead if they want to. Even if I block it, there's no guarantee they'll see the content; they can leave it running and then go to do something else. We need to give the person watching the content full control control, and how they watch it.

I use Play/Pause, Volume, Captions, Playback Speed, Accessibility Controls, Full Screen and Seekbar.  For the Seekbar, if it is a compliance course, I check the box for "Allow to drag after completion".  and like Mark below, if there is a knowledge check, I use variables to prevent the learner from advancing to the quiz before completing the content. 

I am a big proponent of providing adult learners autonomy in their training and thus providing them open navigation as much as possible. This means not locking down the navigation pane, providing a seekbar that is not locked down, including next/submit buttons and previous buttons. The only thing I like to lock down is Knowledge Checks. I use variables to make it so that a learner does not accidentally jump to the Knowledge Checks prior to completing the learning portion of the training objective. 

I really like this question! Just commenting so I can stay notified when folks chime in—really curious to hear if folks have a standard approach to this or if it changes from course to course. 

bkopman​, what has your approach been thus far?