Dress Your E-Learning to the Nines with Custom Player Designs #119

Custom Course Players #119: Challenge | Recap

Can Your Course Be Fully Dressed without a Custom Player?

One of the best ways to step up your e-learning game is to stop using the default options. This includes everything from default colors, buttons, quiz slides, feedback boxes, and even the course player.

There’s nothing wrong with using defaults.They’re designed to help new users focus on what matters most: the content.

But because they’re so easy to access, a lot of course designers will stick with them out of habit, even as their design skills develop beyond them.

Customizing the Look and Feel of Your Course Player

Both Articulate Storyline 2 and Articulate Studio ’13 make it really easy for course designers to customize nearly every aspect of the course player.

Using the Player Properties window, you can control the colors, navigation settings, location of the player menus and tabs, and much more.

With so many options available, there’s no reason not to customize the course player. And that’s what this week’s challenge is all about!

Challenge of the Week

This week, your challenge is to share an example of a customized course player using the built-in player options in Storyline 2 or Studio ’13.

You don’t have to share an entire course. Just share enough so we can get an idea of how you customized your player.

NOTE: This is not a challenge on creating custom menus and navigation. This week’s challenge is all about seeing what’s possible with the options in the Player Properties window.

Sharing Your Custom Players

I expect a lot of you to share your course players.  To make it easier for others to import and manage dozens of new players, please consider giving your player.xml files a unique name. Add your own name to the end or come up with a unique player name.

Resources

Here are some resources to help you get started customizing the player:

Storyline:

Studio ’13:

The following color guides will help you customize your player’s colors:

Customizing the E-Learning Course Player #5

We’re running a similar challenge this week in our screencast challenges. Several users have already shared tips for customizing the course player. If you share an example or download this week, consider recording a quick screencast tutorial to show others how you designed your player.

Last Week’s Challenge

Before you cut a dash in this week’s player challenge, check out the creative examples your fellow community members shared in last week’s labeled graphic challenge:

Using Interactive Markers to Build Labeled Graphics in E-Learning #118

Labeled Graphic Interactions #118: Challenge | Recap

Wishing you a player-ful week, E-Learning Heroes!

New to the E-Learning Challenges?

The weekly challenges are ongoing opportunities to learn, share, and build your e-learning portfolios. You can jump into any or all of the previous challenges anytime you want. I’ll update the recap posts to include your demos.

 

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