Storyline Day 1 - Pirate Trivia

I'm currently self-learning Articulate Storyline 360 for the obvious reason that it's the leading industry standard tool for Instructional Designers. It only makes sense that I become proficient in this software, so follow along as I build projects and familiarize myself with Storyline until I've created a portfolio-worthy project. I may even continue this blog past that, considering how much there is to know about this authoring tool!

Intro

Storyline seems to be similar to Microsoft PowerPoint in many ways, which made it easy to figure out the basics of designing slides (inserting text boxes and images, editing shapes, basic animations, etc.). However, it seems to make it easier to create interactive, nonlinear learning experiences that are quite time consuming to create in PowerPoint.

For my first practice project, I followed a Devlin Peck tutorial to create a simple Pirate Trivia quiz. You can watch the video below for a quick walkthrough of my finished project or experience it for yourself HERE. Or you could do both!

Pirate Trivia Quiz Walkthrough

Learnings

The main features I learned about were states, triggers, and layers.

States - I created custom states for hovering over the buttons and opening the treasure chest on the success slide.

Triggers - These were used for virtually every user action in this project, from button clicks to hovering changes to hiding the key and text once the treasure chest was opened.

Layers - I used a layer for the confetti on the success slide. I thought that was a nice touch.

Challenges

The Problem: The most bewildering challenge I experienced was that I kept getting the following "could not save" error:

I was getting this repeatedly, even after saving to a different location!

After a few minutes of online research, I learned that the problem was where I was saving my file. I use Dropbox, which is a network drive, and that was causing the erratic behaviour.

The Solution: Save locally (to the C: drive). Easy fix!

Final Thoughts

I expect the choice between using layers vs. states to make certain changes is a nuanced one and sometimes based on how Storyline behaves. For example, in the tutorial, Devlin explained that it's better to always create custom states rather than using the built-in ones (except for 'Hidden') because as projects become more complex, Storyline has been known to trigger ALL instances of the same built-in state rather than only the intended one. So, perhaps the confetti could have been executed using state changes, but it was still worth it to practice using layers anyway.

I was disappointed to learn that the 'drag and drop' feature is not accessible. There seems to be no way to navigate it using a keyboard, so Blind and Visually Impaired users would not be able to use this feature. Accessibility is sometimes missed in eLearning experiences, so it's good to be aware of this shortcoming.

Overall, Storyline seems to be fairly easy to pick up at a basic level of functionality, and I look forward to learning the more advanced features so I can make more engaging training materials and utilize and refresh my JavaScript skills.