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From Articulate Storyline to Rise: It’s A Makeover!

December 11, 2016 By Jackie Van Nice Leave a Comment

Select Image to Launch Rise Demo

This week’s Articulate ELH Challenge is to create a responsive course in Rise, Articulate 360’s browser-based tool that lets you quickly create learning that looks great on any device.

The Idea

Since quick reference (QR) guides are usually better when they’re mobile-ready – and since I wanted to compare creating a course in Storyline versus creating one in Rise – I decided to make over an earlier ELH challenge where I used Storyline to make a guide for treating bee stings.

Here’s what I learned about the differences in designing, developing, managing output, and the user experience after comparing Storyline 2* and Rise.

(*Storyline 360 is a more current version of Storyline – and it has phenomenal mobile output – but since I created the original in SL2, I’m using that as my point of comparison.)

Designing

Rise’s Pre-Built Lessons

Rise’s Block Lesson Options

Old Versus New Menus

Unlike Storyline, where you’re working with a do-whatever-you-want blank stage, designing a presentation in Rise relies on understanding exactly what your built-in options are.

There are currently 7 “pre-built” lessons (video, labeled graphic, process, timeline, sorting activity, URL/embed, and quiz) – and customizable lessons you can build with 9 types of “blocks” (text, statement, quote, list, image, gallery, multimedia, interactive, and divider).

For me, working with the available options meant making changes from screen one. In Storyline I had a context-setting intro animation followed by a colorful animated menu, but those would need to be adapted.

For the cover images, I reworked mine to adapt to Rise’s cover image field. My result is OK – but if I were starting from scratch I’d simply use one of Rise’s built-in cover images. There are scads to choose from, they’re beautiful, and they look great on every device.

My menu was automatically replaced with Rise’s economical built-in lesson menu, which is hard to beat for efficiency and responsiveness.

If I wanted a more immersive intro I could have added an introductory lesson with additional images and blah-blah, but restricted myself to making over the same content and keeping it to just 2 lessons to make it the most concise I-just-got-stung-by-a-bee QR guide possible.

That decision – to only have 2 lessons – drove the rest of the design.

Developing

Rise lesson 1 timeline in phone view: Progress bar at top, swipe or scroll, tap to zoom images.

Rise lesson 2 tabs interaction in phone view: Progress bar at top, swipe or scroll, tap to zoom images.

Lesson 1: I used the pre-built timeline lesson because it allows the user to scroll through the 4 immediate steps for a bee sting. I think it works well and it was suuuuuuuuuuuper quick to build once I got through my design dilemmas above and played with a few lesson options.

By the way, you can easily preview your course on any device as you make development decisions, which is a huge help.

Lesson 2: I used customizable blocks to build one lesson with 11 bee sting remedies along with their steps.

The blocks I used for each remedy were a text headline and a tab interaction. Being able to copy and reuse those blocks made development seriously speedy.

Output

Currently your output options are to share a (password protect-able) Web link to your course in Rise or download LMS or Web-ready files to host on your own server. All options are easy as pie.

User Experience

Of course the Rise experience is exactly what you’d want a mobile experience to be: Responsive, simple, and beautiful. My original Storyline 2 version works well in mobile – but you have to tap on the hot spots (no swiping), there’s no progress bar, and it’s not going to be ingeniously responsive when changing screen orientation.

Ready to Rise?

I actually loved working in Rise and I’m reeeeeeally looking forward to creating a Rise course that lets me take full advantage of its high-res image handling and some of its more creative options than this self-imposed makeover challenge allowed.

You can see my super-simple QR guide in Rise right here – and if you need to quickly and easily create straightforward, responsive learning for desktop or mobile – Rise could be a great option!

It’s a Turkish Video Slider!

January 11, 2016 By Jackie Van Nice 2 Comments

Click Image to Launch Video

This week’s challenge is to create an interaction to play video in e-learning courses, so I opened up the video archives and went to work.

The Idea

Since I’ve barely had time to review the video we took on a recent trip to Turkey, it seemed like a good chance to take a look and grab a few snippets for this demo.

The Design

Last year I made a photo slider using stills I took on another trip to Turkey we took a few years ago. Since that interaction was already completely themed for Turkey and included the same towns, it was the perfect launching point for this one.

I made the story size a bit wider to allow more horizontal room for the video, updated the location names, then pretty much inserted the video, trimmed it a bit, and adjusted the volume as needed. Et voilà! A Turkish video slider.

Ready to Travel?

You can see my video slider in all of its random glory – including Dan hassling ice cream vendors on the street – right here. Enjoy!

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

Select Image to Launch Demo

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.

Click Image to Launch Demo (With Audio!)

Select Image to Launch Demo

How Long Does It Take To Create E-Learning?

January 8, 2016 By Jackie Van Nice 14 Comments

Select Image to Launch Demo

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!