Difficult to accurately review in Rise courses

May 15, 2020

I'm producing Rise courses with Storyline embedded interactions and sharing the content for review with subject matter experts (SME's) who don't have Articulate accounts. They are able to make comments.

When they are reviewing courses they are opening interactions such as flashcards or labelled graphics, they find typos or suggestions and add a comment about it on the right. They will have scrolled to a point, opened an interaction, and make a note about it.

When it comes time for me to review I find I need a 3-window (or 4) layout to follow anything.

  1. On the left I have Rise and/or Storyline, where I can look through the content for the changes being mentioned, and/or make edits as I go.
  2. On the center I have Review's Feedback screen because it at least captures a partial screenshot of the area they are talking about. If the user enters multiple comments about an interaction - say a flipcard - Feedback will show a basic screenshot of the general area and then lump all the feedback in together, irrespective of what they have opened or clicked on when they were typing that feedback in.
  3. On the right I have the page in Review mode where i can make reply comments or resolve individual items and use the interactions in the same way being discussed.

I am often unable to find the screens they are talking about without having Rise open as well, so that I'm able to quickly flip through or edit interactions and read the content to find the mentions and mistakes. Under Review, comments are just a long stream down the right and don't position or relate to the content they refer to, as you find in Word or Docs comments which are positioned relative to the content. Under Feedback there are vaguely relevant screen grabs but comments often relate to content within an interaction and the feedback list doesn't provide enough context to be useful (except perhaps as a meeting agenda).

What I'd really like to see is actual references from individual comments to the specific screen areas they are looking at. This could be a screen grab every time they press Post when commenting. Alternately the ability for them to use annotation tools to draw lines or arrows over the review content and reference these in comments would be an excellent addition - perhaps showing up when I select individual comments. Short screen recordings with audio support would be great as a comment so the SME could show and talk about their problem as a clip.

The SMEs doing the review aren't always technically savvy or time-rich. I can ask them to take screenshots of the areas under review and then attach those to the individual comments when posting, but I end up explaining more about how to do that process rather than reviewing the content itself. We sometimes end up doing Zoom meetings and screen sharing so I can see what specific items they are talking about!

Just having the ability to click feedback (from Review or Feedback screens) and have it open the review page at that interaction would be good. Having the ability to jump back into Storyline or Rise for editing the content pertinent to that individual comment would be perfect.

Lastly, there's no good indication what version of the content the Resolve feature was pressed in relation to. Say I have a typo - the reviewer picks it up and makes a comment. Do I go back to Rise and republish the course to review and go to the comment to resolve it, and what does the reviewer see? How do they know what changed between the latest version and the previous that was newly resolved for them to look at? Nobody is sure who should press Resolve or when. Using the 'Current Version' drop down to toggle between published states to see comments changing is frustrating enough to be totally avoided.

Is there a roadmap of changes coming to Review which considers any of this? As it stands I'm better off doing a Zoom screen-share right from within Rise or Storyline and live-checking and editing with the SME's and reviewers than to battle with the often-frustrating comment system.

1 Reply
Leslie McKerchie

Hi Tim,

Thank you for sharing all of the details of what you are experiencing and would like to see in Review 360.

We have a couple of open feature requests that sound like they would benefit you as well, so I've added this conversation to those reports as we track user impact and so that we can share any updates with you in the future:

Display Comments on New Version for Comparison

Hyperlink in the comment email should bring the author to the slide.

Resolving comments is intended to avoid any confusion on issues that have been addressed or are no longer relevant. If you, as the designer, make a requested edit or change, you can mark it as resolved. If someone simply has a question or wishes to have a discussion with you, they can mark an item as resolved as well. All reviewers can resolve comments.

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