Comparing the Storyline 360 Responsive Player with Adobe Captivate’s Responsive Solution

Mobile learning presents so many exciting opportunities for learners and organizations alike. Connecting people with the information they need—no matter where they are—makes them more independent and autonomous. And organizations that embrace mobile learning will find themselves able to scale their training efforts more cost-effectively. It’s a win-win!

With these perks, we expect you’ll increasingly be asked to create e-learning content that looks and works great on mobile devices. There are different ways to do this, but we think you’ll love our approach to delivering multi-device e-learning.

Why? Because the technology just works.

Before we introduce you to our cool new tools for creating multi-device e-learning, let’s look at how another authoring tool tackles this challenge.

A Different Approach to Creating Mobile E-Learning

Using Adobe Captivate to create e-learning for mobile devices requires a lot of steps. You need to adjust the elements on all your slides for the breakpoints you’ll encounter on different screen sizes. That means you have to manually customize your content for each possible platform your learners could use to access your content.

This approach puts the responsibility of making sure that your project looks the way you want, on any device, squarely on your shoulders.

We know that you care about keeping your course looking the way you intended it. And when you’re creating slide-based e-learning, that means preserving the positioning of different elements on your slides. For example, let’s say you’ve designed a slide where a character is pointing to an object to her left. When the screen narrows considerably for a mobile phone, the slide won’t work if the character and object get repositioned. Learners will wonder what your character is pointing at if the object is now above her head!

With Captivate, you have to re-design each slide for the screen size of each device you plan to support. With all the different devices out there, we just don’t think it’s realistic for e-learning developers—who already have tons of work on their hands—to be required to tweak their courses for every possible screen size. That’s why we’ve taken a different approach to helping e-learning developers create training for mobile devices.

A Responsive Player That Does the Work for You

With the responsive player in Storyline 360 and Studio 360, the courses you build with these apps look great on any device automatically. It takes just one click to publish your courses.

Then, when your learners launch your course (no special app required!), the responsive player will detect when they’re using a mobile device and adjust to fit the screen size. What’s great is that the responsive player does this without shifting the content on your slides. It fluidly responds to different mobile screen sizes and orientations, hiding sidebar menus, eliminating browser chrome, and delivering mobile-friendly playback controls.

It’s like watching a video on your smartphone or tablet: the picture is scaled up or down depending on how much screen real estate is available, but the content is left just as the director intended. When you publish your Storyline 360 or Studio 360 course, the responsive player reacts the same way. It optimizes the screen real estate but doesn’t change the content itself. The responsive player also supports touch screen gestures for a more natural experience on tablets and smartphones.

Want to see an example? Check out this course demo, created in Storyline 360, on your phone or tablet. See for yourself how awesome it looks!

How the Articulate 360 Responsive Player Can Help You

We think you’ll like our approach to creating multi-device e-learning. It lets you focus on creating beautiful courses, not adapting those courses to countless device sizes.

You can even use the responsive device preview to see how your course will look in different devices and orientations before you even publish. That makes it so easy to understand how the course will feel for learners, no matter how they’re accessing it.

Once you’ve designed the experience you want your learners to have, you publish once and—voila! It just works, everywhere. No tweaking required.

Whether you’re previewing or publishing, Storyline 360 and Studio 360 do the work for you to make sure your course will look great on any device. And if you have a big library of content you’ve already created in Storyline 1 or Storyline 2, we have awesome news for you. You can re-publish your courses with Storyline 360 and they’ll work perfectly with our responsive player.

Try It Out for Yourself

To take a deeper dive into creating multi-device courses, check out our detailed “The Definitive Guide to Multi-Device E-Learning” e-book and the FAQs about the responsive player here. Then get a free trial of Articulate 360 to try out the responsive features in Storyline 360 and Studio 360.

Note: The responsive player is also available with Storyline 3

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Adam Hain
Adam Hain
Math Notermans