At Yukon Learning, our mission is “Making e-Learning Easy for Everyone.” One of the ways we do so is by coming up with mnemonic devices (or just parodied song lyrics) to help participants in training remember key things about Storyline 360. In this article, let’s review some of these phrases you might hear from our trainers.
“If you like it then you shoulda put a name on it.”
Our beloved Ron Price likes to say that Beyoncé was once an e-Learning designer and that while developing, she came up with the idea for her hit song when she was renaming objects in the timeline.
You may have noticed that when you insert a button, for example, the default name on your timeline is “Button 1.” Now, if that’s the only button on the slide and/or you’ll never have anyone else working in your Storyline 360 project file, you might be fine. However, at Yukon Learning, our best practice is to name almost everything—especially objects that will be part of an interaction. This makes it easier when developing triggers and easier for others to update your project in the future.
Simply locate the object you want to rename in the timeline and double-click the name on the left or right-click and select Rename.
Tip: Name correct answers for freeform quiz questions with something like a “C” or an asterisk to indicate which choices should be designated as correct in the Form View. This helps when you’re not the Subject Matter Expert or don’t have the content on hand, both now and for edits in the future.
“Make it great then duplicate!”
A phrase you’ll hear many of us say over and over again has to do with the way we develop at Yukon Learning…we make something great and then simply duplicate it.
We find this makes development faster when we focus on getting the first object how we’d like and then use it as a template for the others we may need. While this may seem like just a preference on our part, it also helps with consistency.
Imagine making adjustments individually to several buttons on a custom menu slide. You may forget to make each of those adjustments to all of the buttons and end up with one that doesn’t quite look like the others. While you can also always use Format Painter to copy over states and visual formatting, we encourage you to build the first button and create duplicates so they all have a consistent size, shape, and appearance.
“Because you know I’m all about that base…”
You may also hear some of our “trainors” (see what I did there?) singing “all ’bout that bass, ’bout that bass,” as the lyrics of Meghan Trainor could help you remember a key piece of information about where triggers should often be added.
You see, a common mistake when beginning in Storyline 360 is to place triggers on a layer when they should actually go on the base, even if the developer intended the trigger to live on the base. When adding new triggers for the base slide, make sure you have the Base Layer selected in the Slide Layers panel. You can quickly and easily determine which layer is currently selected because it will be highlighted in blue.
For instance, when triggering layers to show, we can’t show a layer from within itself. The “Show layer” trigger needs to be outside of the layer, which is more often than not on the base slide.
Tip: The best practice here lies around previewing your course to do proper testing before publishing for your learners. If you preview a slide and an action isn’t working as expected, double-check where you placed the triggers!
We try to balance information and personality during training, often using some of the catch phrases above and helpful songs we hope remain stuck in your head while developing…apologies in advance.
~ John M.
What are some of your favorite mnemonic devices for Storyline 360 or the Articulate tools? We’d love for you to post them in the comments below and if they’re good enough, we might just steal them and start using them in training!
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