Storyline 360

When Postcards Need Glossaries

May 14, 2018 By Jackie Van Nice 2 Comments

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This week’s Articulate ELH Challenge is to create an example of a glossary for e-learning. I’ve been meaning to make one lately, so this was a good chance to play.

The Idea

People have done some wonderfully creative interactions for this challenge that you can check out here. In my case I wanted to create an über-practical glossary that was incredibly quick to build, easy to maintain, and that could handle a lot of entries. Oh, and my example helps decode German idioms used by someone visiting Bali.

The Design

Back of the Postcard

The Postcard

The postcard itself is straightforward: A front-of-postcard screen and a back-of-postcard screen. On the back of the postcard there’s an instruction to hover over/select underlined text to see its meaning. When you do, a lightboxed glossary slide is displayed.

The Glossary

Inserted Table Lightboxed Glossary

The glossary itself is built using an inserted Storyline 360 table; a feature I love. In this example I only have a few glossary entries, but for more you could either place a longer table into a scrolling panel, or you could use multiple glossary screens with lightbox navigation to jump between them.

The Result

Ready to see which German idioms cause vacation confusion? See the glossary that straightens it all out in this air mail special delivery interaction!

Lightboxing Some Art

May 10, 2018 By Jackie Van Nice 2 Comments

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This week’s Articulate ELH challenge is to show an example of how lightboxes can be used in e-learning.

An Arty Lightboxed Drag-and-Drop Question

The Idea

When I think of lightboxes I think of art projects, so art seemed like a good theme.

I also wanted to show how they could be used in e-learning as exporable objects to play with something you may already know about, or to explore something new. (Exploring is always good.)

The Design

I wanted the interaction to be grounded in an art museum, and I pulled the museum image from Storyline 360’s content library. I designed the color palette and general look and feel based on that image.

Feedback in Case of a Chagall and Rothko Mix-Up

Feedback in Case of Any Chagall/Rothko Mix-Ups

The Lightboxes

Each lightbox is a drag-and-drop interaction set to allow you to try again as many times as you’d like. In these examples there are only two possible answers, but I think there’s something about that simplicity that makes them kind of fun to play with. I also included hints on the try again screen, and feedback and a bit more information on the success screen.

Because a lightbox in Storyline only displays at 80% of a regular slide’s size, you’ll want to be sure that your images and text are large enough to be viewed at that reduced size when using them in projects. It also helps to take full advantage of your screen real estate when laying out screen objects.

The Result

It’s simple, but kind of fun! Ready to play with some arty lightboxes? Try them out right here!

Escape Room Game: When Birthday Parties Go Wrong

May 2, 2018 By Jackie Van Nice 17 Comments

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This week’s Articulate ELH challenge is to create an escape-room-style game. (Scary!)

Party Equipment

The Idea

My first escape idea was going to have you desperately trying to catch your international flight before it took off, but the mega-talented Jodi Sansone beat me to it (great minds) and did a lovely job, so it was back to the drawing board. In the end I came up with the idea of frantically trying to make a last-minute birthday cake for a little girl’s birthday party: Let the terror begin.

The Design

Images

My first step was was to build a vector kitchen. As the days went by I couldn’t help but wonder if I could have saved time and energy by building a real kitchen.

The Kitchen Stage

These are mostly flat design vector images. I pulled a few from the 360 Content Library as icons or illustrations and manipulated their size, shape, and/or color (juicer, grinder, a few objects on the results screen, maybe the measuring cup… it’s all kind of a blur at this point), but I purchased most and manipulated them in Adobe Illustrator. The focus is on the table and mixing bowl in the foreground.

The Game

The Birthday Girl

I wanted three outcomes:

Success: You got the right ingredients in the bowl in the allotted time and achieved the desired result.
Failure: Your time ran out and things didn’t end well.
Keep going and try again: You put an incorrect ingredient in the bowl and have to dump out the bowl and start over, but the timer is still running.

The Timer

Update: I’ve made the timer available as a free download right here! The issue was the timer and finding a way to give it a two-minute duration that I could reliably start, stop, and restart. Very long story short – after trying lots of options I needed to design and build something quickly, so I winged it with an incredibly simple animated timer.

Timer recipe:

1 two-minute-long ticking sound effect
1 timer ding sound effect
1 image of a kitchen timer with a white face
1 inserted yellow circle shape
1 inserted red circle shape

Superimpose the yellow and red circles on the timer face, in that order, and give each one a 59-second wheel entrance animation. Place the red circle so it starts at the 59-second mark on the timeline. The clock and yellow circle start at the beginning of the timeline, along with the ticking sound effect. The ticking will end when you trigger the timer ding to go off at the end of the 2 minutes, at which point you could jump to a layer or another slide or whatever you’d like to do.

Once in action you’ll see the yellow circle animating in for the first minute, turning the face from white to yellow. In the second minute you’ll see it go from yellow to red, letting you know you’d better get that cake in the oven.

In this game the timer helps increase the sense of urgency, looks flat and cute, and serves its purpose.

The Drag-and-Drop

In the end, this was pretty straightforward. There are three items that require a two-step drop process before they can be used successfully, but you’ll find written hints to give you a clue about what to do and every item is labeled if you tap on it. Searching for clues and things you can use is all part of the game!

The Result

Ready to make a cake for the birthday girl? Grab an apron and make it happen!

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A Yummy, Fresh and FREE Tabs Interaction!

May 1, 2018 By Jackie Van Nice 4 Comments

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This week’s Articulate ELH challenge is to create a fresh new tabs interaction, so I went outside and picked some inspiration.

The Idea

I wanted to make this a Storyline 360 tabs interaction I could share, so with that in mind I focused on simplicity, functionality, and reusability.

The Design

The Fruity Theme Colors

Colors

I honestly just started with colors I liked and made a color palette from there. To make the template easy to reuse, I saved them as a set of Theme Colors at Design > Colors in Storyline. You can save them down with a different name and/or you can change out one or all of the colors by editing them on that screen.

Images

My theme needed some delicious-looking fruit and veg, so I inserted all of the photos into Storyline from the Content Library. If you swap them out by right clicking and choosing Change Picture, you can replace them with your own images and not lose the animations.

Mangoes in Their Visited State

Tab States

Selected: There’s no actual selected state, because the color of the selected tab matches the background of the revealed content screen, which I think is a good visual indicator of which tab you’re on. I like using that effect.

Hover: The hover state is a semi-transparent version of the tab’s color. To adjust the color or transparency, select the tab, then States > Edit States. Select the Hover state, right click on it, then select Format Shape > Fill Color. At the bottom of that screen you can adjust the color and/or level of transparency.

Visited: I like more control over my states than the built-in ones can give me sometimes, and to get that control I give them custom names. In this case I called the visited state “checked” because I’ve added a check mark to the tab’s state to show it’s been seen. You can also edit this state and remove or replace the checkmark with any image you’d like. Right now there’s a trigger on the tab’s layer to change the tab’s state to “checked” at the beginning of the layer’s timeline.

Disabled: When on a content screen, I didn’t want the user to see an active hover state for the currently-selected tab. That would be confusing and seem like a sloppy build. To keep it solid I added a transparent disabling shape on the layer and placed it directly over the tab, which effectively disables it from showing its hover state. You could always do this by adding a disabled state along with its triggers, but this is another way to do it.

Making the selected tab the same color as its content screen makes navigation clearer.

Content Screen States

Each content screen (layer) is set to show its saved state when revisited. Unless there’s a compelling reason to have the animations repeat when revisiting, I’m happier going back to review each screen without waiting for the animations to execute again.

The Fresh Result and Free Download!

Ready for some fresh and fruity tabbed fun? See the demo right here, and grab the free Storyline 360 file on its download page.

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.