Why I Use Scenes in Articulate Storyline

Alrighty – A few weeks back, I hopped on a new project that I’ve really been enjoying. The only downside was that I married into an Articulate Storyline file that was organized in such a way that it quickly became unruly.

Unruly? How?

This one particular aspect of the project involved creating a sort of library to house seminar videos. Each month, a 4-5 hour seminar would be recorded and I would use Camtasia to break the videos up into more manageable chunks. Each seminar ended up having 18-24 videos…for a duration of 6 months.

The original file quickly became unruly because I think there wasn’t as much understanding of how quickly 130+ videos/screens could get out of hand. What transpired was one scene within the Storyline file; this one scene contained all 130+ videos, which made it incredibly difficult to hunt down individual screens when making to the file later on.

I know it doesn’t look too unruly from this screenshot, but note the horizontal scrolling. Oof.

We ended up resolving to leave this file as is, after all revisions had been made, but I explained that I would be a bit more purposeful and organized in my development of the next 6 month period.

But, Ashley…How did you tame the unruliness?!

I used scenes! Scenes are basically boxes which contain slides; you can link to scenes just as you would like to slides, but it creates a more organized look and makes managing your Storyline file a biiiiit more manageable. Now, different strokes for different folks – some people might use scenes for different reasons, but for this project – the scenes were set up for ease of use from a development perspective.

The starting scene houses the Main Menu. From here, each ‘button’ trigger links to a new scene (which is a Menu for the relevant seminar). All seminar videos are housed within these new scenes. The outcome is this:

Phew! SO MUCH easier to look at, eh?! If you don’t give me a resounding ‘yes’, I might cry. In this project, we have 2 seminars (1 of which has yet to be populated). At the end of the 6 month period, there will be 7 scenes: 1 that houses the main menu, and 6 that house each of the seminar videos. I can easily locate the relevant seminar that requires revisions, and life is a lot easier.

I realize that talking about scenes may seem incredibly basic, but when you’re a first-time user of Storyline, tasked to find a way of organizing 130+ videos, you will likely end up with an story view as illustrated in the first screenshot, only to realize you’re causing a lot more heartache than necessary. Trust me. If you need to organize a vast amount of slides, USE YOUR SCENES!

Hopefully this was relatable and/or helpful to someone! If you have any other questions about using Scenes in Articulate Storyline, definitely reach out to me, and I’ll help out as best I can.