Instructional Design

Navigating a Tasty Circular Menu

April 22, 2018 By Jackie Van Nice 8 Comments

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This week’s Articulate ELH challenge is to create a circular navigation menu to mimic the sorts of menus used in mobile apps, save screen real estate, and give the design a sleeker look.

The Idea

I thought I’d use the navigation menu to explore a food menu. Leaning into the circular theme led me to selecting a big round plate and all of the round dishes that ended up on it.

The Design

Building the Menu

My circular menu: Note that Pasta stays selected even after the menu has been closed and reopened.

A sample Storyline file was offered as a challenge resource, but I find it easier to dig in and build things from scratch. It takes longer but it’s soooooo much easier to wrap my head around what I build on my own, plus I love the challenge of figuring it all out.

The menu items are inserted shapes nested under the main menu, which is also an inserted shape. I added two motion paths to each one – the first to move outward when the menu is selected, and second to return to the original position.

By the way, working with motion paths in Storyline is so much easier now. Being able to name the paths is helpful, but being able to align and snap motion path items is a thing of beauty. I’d have loved to have had those features when I created my Fontcracker Suite and Faces of the Ebola Response challenge entries!

The other thing I wanted to add was a “selected” menu item state AND have it retain that state even after the menu has been closed and re-opened. I think it’s helpful when a menu tells you where you are. That upped my trigger count, but I really like the result.

The food items are activated to appear when the user clicks a menu item and the state of a transparent shape on top of the plate changes to display the selected dish.

The behind-the-scenes food states for the transparent rectangle that covers the plate.

The Images

All images are from the 360 Content Library, including the main menu’s “hamburger” and X icons. The food options were dictated by how possible it was to remove the background from each one so I could put it on the plate and have it look plausible.

I used the Format > Remove Background tool in PowerPoint, which worked like a charm.

Pasta Before Removing Background

Pasta After Removing Background

Pie Before Removing Background

Pie After Removing Background

Oranges Before Removing Background

Oranges After Removing Background

The Result

After that there’s nothing left to do but choose what you’d like on the menu! You can try it out here or by selecting the image below. Buon appetito!

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Dining Out in Italy: Do It For the Progress Bars and Badges

April 17, 2018 By Jackie Van Nice Leave a Comment

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This week’s ELH Challenge is to show how to use badges, awards, and achievements in e-learning. I don’t always use a ton of these in my client projects, so this was a nice chance to play.

The Idea

Since showing progress and achievements for their own sake doesn’t do much to connect with learner motivation, I wanted an end goal that would be motivating to achieve and a learning goal that would enable the learner to achieve it.

I decided on a simple language learning demo that puts you in the position of having to use enough Italian to navigate dining out in Italy. Learner gotta eat.

The Design

I wanted this to be simple and intuitive, so I didn’t use any written or audio instructions (with the exception of “Try Again”) or try to flesh out restaurant scenes or interactions in any detail. The focus is on the language and the related progress and achievements.

Italian flag colors

Color-wise I thought about including an Italian flag somewhere, but it seemed like an overused and unnecessary indicator. Instead I grabbed the RGB and hex codes for the Italian flag and used those colors on a largely monochromatic stage throughout.

The Reinforcing Progress Bar

Though I’ve used beer mugs, mountains, mai tai glasses, scoreboards, typography states, and I-don’t-even-know-what-else to show progress – I’ve never designed a standard progress bar. So I thought I’d give it a shot.

Somewhere in David Anderson’s suggested resources this week (I’d point to it but have lost it in the shuffle), Tom Kuhlmann was giving the basics of progress meters. I took away that putting them on master slides isn’t a bad idea and that indicating chunks of progress can be quite simple, which was very helpful and enough to get going.

I have 4 quiz questions in this demo, each equating to 25% progress on the bar. Each question focuses on one small bit of vocabulary. For reinforcement, I embedded that bit of vocabulary directly into the progress bar once it had been used correctly.

The Badges

I added what are basically earned badges alongside the progress bar. Since they’re images that illustrate the target vocabulary in that section, it seemed like another good bit of reinforcement.

My progress bar with embedded target vocabulary and corresponding badge awarded for achievement.

Feedback

There are four ways to figure out whether your answer was correct or not: The look on the server’s face, what he’s saying in Italian, your progress (or lack of it) shown via the progress bar and badges, and whether or not you see the Try Again button.

Since this is more about exposure to vocabulary in context and not every word is meant to be understood, there’s more value to mulling over and playing with the options rather than simply counting something as wrong and moving on. That’s why each question is set to let you play/guess/answer as many times as you’d like.

The Result

Ready to see if you can navigate going out to dinner in Italian? You can give it a try right here. Buon appetito!

The Top 5 Reasons I’m Grateful for More than 2 Years of #ELHChallenges

January 10, 2016 By Jackie Van Nice 8 Comments

Click for the Full List of Challenges (Image Credit: Articulate)

When I first heard about Articulate’s ELH Challenges (which may well have been in this post from Tom Kuhlmann) it was clear they’d be a fantastic way to sharpen my skills and get involved in the community – but it still took me until #8 to put in an entry, and until #20 to get hooked.

To date I’ve completed 108 challenges, and although it’s taken a lot of time and effort to stick with them, it’s been life changing. I’m grateful for them every day, and thought I’d pause for a moment to share my top 5 reasons why.

1. Connection with a Vibrant Community

Whether you’re talking about Fearless Challenge Leader David Anderson, who always comes up with unique, creative challenges and sets the enthusiastic, inclusive, and ever-encouraging tone – or the extraordinary range of participants who never fail to share remarkable solutions and ideas along with a great deal of kindness and wisdom – the value of that energy and those connections can’t be overstated.

2. The Chance to Hone My Design Skills

I already had a good sense of my design sensibilities before coming into the challenges, but having the chance to stretch and practice and grow outside of the constraints of client projects was an absolute gift. If not for the challenges, I’d never have had the impetus to create a silly little paper doll slider, a romantic approach to filling out a passport form, an homage to health workers in West Africa, or a way to try different shades of lipstick on George Washington. It would have been unthinkable.

3. The Chance to Push My Software Skills

I think we all have a tendency to go with what we already know when it comes to software – especially when we’re on deadline and need to knock something out. So being challenged to grow and figure out how to do a whole lot more with Storyline (and other software) each week – either because David presented a new technical challenge or because my design ideas were forcing me to do more complex things – was another leap forward.

4. A Pretty Swingin’ Portfolio

No one ever asks to see my portfolio. By the time they contact me they’ve already had the chance to wander through over 100 pieces of my work (most of which are challenge entries), along with written explanations about each one. Once on the phone they can’t wait to tell me how much they loved things like the German drinking game, Big History timeline, or tic-tac-toe game and want to use those ideas in their company’s own courses.

5. A Whole Lot of Work

When other designers ask me where to find work, what companies look for in their ads, or what to put on their résumés – I’m useless. I have no idea. I spend my time designing e-learning projects for clients, working on new Articulate challenge entries, and keeping those entries visible. Because of that, wonderful people at creative companies who need someone to design custom e-learning find me. Many peers will tell you the same, and I wrote about how to get work like this – but only if you want work to come to you in a painless and enormously fun way.

So there you have it! The top 5 reasons I’m incredibly grateful for more than 2 years of Articulate challenges. To be honest, any one of those 5 reasons would have been enough to make participation worthwhile, but together they’ve enhanced my work life beyond measure.

Thank you, Articulate.

Before & After Comparison: Is It Coffee Cake Yet?

January 9, 2016 By Jackie Van Nice 6 Comments

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This week’s challenge is to create an interaction that lets the user explore a before-and-after visual comparison. The serious nature of the examples told me I should add something of importance to the visual conversation.

The Idea

The idea is that coffee cakes must get baked, and that someone needs to shine the light of understanding on their brave journey.

The Design

States of Cake

For the cake, I grabbed two photos: One of an unbaked coffee cake, and one of a baked coffee cake. I added states to the unbaked image that took it from 0% transparency at the beginning of my timeline to 100% transparency at the end. I placed the baked image underneath and left it at 0% transparency.

I used 20 states, some of which you can see here, and named each state for the percentage of transparency I’d applied.

To allow control of the interaction I used a slider to represent the length of the baking time, using a kitchen timer as the thumb image and an on-screen indicator to show elapsed minutes. To add a bit more interest I added the tick-tock of a kitchen timer that lasts as long as baking is in progress, and the ding of the timer once the cake is done.

Now We Just Need Coffee!

Ready to make cake happen? You can give it a go right here.

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How Long Does It Take To Create E-Learning?

January 8, 2016 By Jackie Van Nice 14 Comments

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This week’s challenge is to share an instructional design cheat sheet, job aid, or reference you use in your work.

The Idea

The Chapman Alliance Study

I alllllllllways refer to this Chapman study on how long it takes to create e-learning every time someone approaches me about a project. Since that makes it my most-used reference piece by far, I thought I’d translate it into a zippy little interaction that might even be a tad easier to follow than the original.

The Design

Since the study is focusing on hours, I thought it would be smart to build it around the image of a clock.

Once I found a flat design clock I liked, I added Chapman’s three primary levels of e-learning design to the main slide and used layers to animate the hour estimates for each level onto the clock face itself.

After that I used lots of triggers to make the interaction as intuitive and user-friendly as possible, both visually and functionally, and added a lightboxed slide to provide more detail about the study that also links back to the original.

The Result

As much as I love the original info from Chapman, I’ll no doubt point to this one more. If you’d like to see it in action, you can start estimating your e-learning project hours right here!