Ashley Chiasson, M.Ed

Instructional Designer & Consultant

Storyline Demo

Articulate Storyline: 3 Things I’m Excited About – 2019

If ever there was a time for an Excited Jonah Hill Gif reference! OH. BOY! THE. TIME. IS. NOW!

I’m ramping up to deliver a session on Top Tips (when using) Articulate Storyline, and boy. oh. boy. Have the Articulate Storyline 360 updates in recent months been coming in handy!

#1 – The New Trigger Workflow

Holy (excuse my language) shit (or poop, or caca, or amazeballs)! THIS. IS. A. GAME. CHANGER! I once got a sneak peek of this about a year ago over breakfast, and let me tell you…my eggs were not as exciting as I had hoped for afterward.

 

It’s smart, it’s intuitive, it’s modern…I can now start to type the action I’m looking for or the occurrence I’m looking for and it narrows down my options. Holy crap! This makes things SO MUCH FASTER in terms of workflow!

In the Triggers Panel, you can also use the linked dropdown (for ANY portion of the trigger programming) to quickly adjust what needs adjusting -swooooon-! I will say that this does call to the front and centre the importance of labeling things on your timeline, but hey – I’ll lecture you about that in another post. Today we’re joyous.

#2 – SLIDE NUMBERS!!!

I recently posted a screencast showing one method of creating a visual progress meter using the new slide number functionality, and let me tell you…you have so many options when it comes to this. The slide number functionality provides you with a bunch of built-in variables:

And, you can use these variables in many ways to achieve your progress meter creation goals! Stay tuned for other options! This is functionality that I consider an entire game changer. It gives you permission to stop manually setting variables on a slide-by-slide basis, and for this we should praise all of the deities simultaneously. I also like that Articulate is providing you with options, because one progress meter is not the same for all.

#3 – The Recover a Corrupt File Feature

If you’ve been working in Storyline for awhile, you probably know that corrupted files are just a reality. Well – one thing that’s nice is that in a recent update, Articulate has provided a feature that allows you to recover a recently corrupted file, or at a minimum notifies you whether there is a temporary file stored elsewhere.

I cannot explain how valuable this is. I have spent a lot of money on hopefully software purchases claiming to recover my lost data…I have spent hours of my life redoing project files…I’m pretty sure that if this feature would have come out 5 years ago, I would have much fewer grey hairs. I would also likely not have bored 75-100 people to tears in my 2016 Articulate Roadshow: Toronto session (I’m sorry to any of you who were in attendance…though, you likely at some point since then have heeded all of the advice I provided), as now they have one less thing to worry about when it comes to backing up their files.

E-Learning Heroes Challenge #199 – Tabs Navigation

Tonight I was feeling a little nostalgic for the E-Learning Heroes Challenges. For that reason, and the fact that David Anderson is probably going to nag me to participate more when we see each other this week (I KID!), I whipped something up in my evening wind down.

Challenge

This challenge was to create one of the most common of e-learning interactions: tabbed navigation. Every e-learning developer has created a tabbed interaction, so it’s always nice to have a repository of suggestions to consult when you feel as though you need to freshen up your development approach. This is what I love about the E-Learning Heroes Challenge recaps – sometimes my brain is too tired to think!

Method

For this tabbed interaction, I first went to Pinterest, where I stumbled upon this horizontal tab menu, and I loved the look/feel. Next, I opened Storyline to try and replicate the effect. It’s not perfect, but it’s close enough for me. I fiddled with the design size, consulted coolors.co for a colour palette, and then wrote a bunch of things about myself.

Result

Like I said, it’s not perfect, but it’s close. And at past-bedtime-o’clock, I’m happy with it.

Click Here to view the full interaction.

Screencast Monday: Extending Slide Content in Articulate Storyline – Part 3: Scroll Panels

Continuing with the theme of extending slide content in Articulate Storyline, this week I’m showing you just how easy it is to extend slide content within a ‘container’ by using a scroll panel. If after this demo you’re interested in learning a bit more about scroll panels, check out the Automatic Scrolling Effect demo!

(Also – Please excuse the sound of my dog gnawing on his toes)

Screencast Monday: Extending Slide Content in Storyline Part 1 – Slide Layers

My apologies for the late post; I was going to do a first impression type of screencast with a new technology that has me pretty excited, but there was a bit of a glitch during the demo, and I’m still waiting for technical support to get back to me. Maybe you’ll see the demo next week…maybe not at all – who knows?!

This week we’ll look at how you can easily extend slide content using layers in Articulate Storyline.

Understanding all of the ways in which you can extend slide content is essential as it may allow you to reduce overall slide count in your projects, leading to a more streamlined and efficient project structure.