Learn. Show. Repeat.

Tag: Storyline 2

Pushing My Buttons
Often when we talk about our work, we talk in terms of ‘what’ we did. The Showing My Work series of posts aim to also capture the ‘how’ something was done.

E-Learning Heroes Challenge #89 – Creative Button Styles and Effects. The brief: This week, your challenge is to have fun with buttons! Play with different shapes, styles, and effects to show how you can use buttons creatively in e-learning. Be sure to include the Normal, Hover, and Selected states in your work.

In this challenge from a few months ago, we had to design some buttons. I came a little late to the party with this challenge and lots of great ideas had already been shared so I thought I’d try something a little different. I was on the train on my way back to Newcastle from Sydney so, with some time to kill I played around with some ideas. The brief was straightforward, our buttons had to have at least three states:
- Normal (how it appears on-screen)
- Hover (how it looks when you hover your mouse over)
- Selected (how it looks when it’s been clicked or pressed)
As usual I sketched my initial ideas on paper:

I had an idea (from the imaged used in the challenge that week) that maybe the buttons could react to each other based on what was happening at the time i.e. being hovered over and being selected. The illustrated characters in Storyline have in-built expressions and I thought that I could use these for the different states for each character.

So I opened up my laptop and began to experiment with my ideas in Storyline 2.

The design itself is pretty simple – a plain background, a headshot of my three characters (to do this I inserted each character and cropped them) and a rounded rectangle shape with a light fill and a thick border.

In Storyline, ‘states’ allow you to the alter the appearance of an object – think the Incredible Hulk is the angry state of Dr Bruce Banner – and by default when you insert an object onto a slide in Storyline, how it looks is called its ‘normal’ state. So for my buttons, the normal state has each character with a neutral expression:

Note: I couldn’t group the character and the rounded rectangle shape together because grouped objects don’t have a state.

For my hover state, I changed the expression of my character to ‘thinking’ like it’s getting ready to be chosen. I also thought it would be fun to have the other two buttons react because the mouse wasn’t hovering over them, so I created a state where they have a ‘worried’ expression on their face and they also look towards the button being hovered. To cater for the different combinations, my first guy would need to look to the right, my middle guy would need to look left and right and my third guy would need to look towards the left. So I created a left and/or right state for my characters.
Because I added the in-built hover state to each character, no trigger was needed. But I needed to add triggers to the characters for their left/right states when one of the other characters was being hovered over. Here’s an example:

I also thought I’d like to change the colour of the border when the mouse is hovering over the character. I couldn’t use the in-built hover state here because I didn’t want the state to change when I hovered over the shape so I created a state for it called ‘roll over’ and added another trigger:

All I had left to do was the selected state and unexpectedly, this took this longest to figure out. The way I wanted the buttons to work was that once a button was selected, it stopped reacting with the other ones. I created a selected state where the character looked happy because he’d been chosen. It worked in that it changed state (to looking happy) but it also continued to react when it was hovered over or one of the other buttons was hovered over.

I tried adding disabled state with a happy expression on my character but that didn’t work.

I tried using a button set on the characters and that didn’t work either.

Finally I tried adding a layer with a new rounded rectangle (with a green frame) and a copy of my character with a happy expression and success! The only thing I had to then do go into the slide layer properties and untick the ‘Hide other slide layers box’.

Whilst I probably won’t ever use buttons like this in a project, this was yet another example of how participating in a weekly challenge can help build your skills in using Storyline. All up this demo was pretty much done on the two and a half hour trip home (it was probably closer to 90 mins). You can see it for yourself by clicking on the image below to launch the demo:

Let me know what you think and you can see all of my ELH Challenge entries on My Portfolio page.

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October 18, 2015
Bingo Time!

Often when we talk about our work, we talk in terms of ‘what’ we did. The Showing My Work series of posts aim to also capture the ‘how’ something was done.

E-Learning Heroes Challenge #98 – E-Learning Buzzword Bingo Games. The brief: This week your challenge is to create an e-learning buzzword bingo card or interaction.

My first idea for this challenge was to create a bingo card using the most overused words in learning, for example engagement or thought leader or wearable technology. But then I had another idea, instead of using words you might hear at a conference why not pictures of people you might see at a conference (so strictly speaking I did deviate from the brief a little with this one).

As DevLearn is coming up soon I figured that would give me a good list of folks who I could include and as it turned out, they’d be the ones whose sessions I would like to attend if I was going to the conference. The idea is that you mark them off if you see their session or see them around during the conference.

The first thing I did was make a list of people to include on my bingo ‘card’ and then locate an image of each. I inserted my first image into PowerPoint and used the cropping tool to make the image as close to a square as I could. Then as I wanted a round picture of each person I was able to use the ‘Crop to a Shape’ feature and select a circle:

Once I had my circle image, a quick right-click ‘Save as Picture’ and I was done. I then repeated this process for each image.

Next I jumped into Storyline and inserted a background image of stars in the night sky (from Shutterstock) because these folks were some of the stars of DevLearn! I placed each image on the slide and because it’s a game, I wanted to allocate points for each person you see. To do this, I used the ‘states’ area and I created a second state for my first image:

I used the disabled state (because then it could only be selected once) and I just darkened the image and placed a text box on it with their name and points value. Then when I was finished, I clicked ‘Done Editing States’. To save some time, I used ‘Format Painter’ to copy the formatting from my first picture to all my other pictures and all I needed to do was change the name of each person on their disabled state.

I then added a trigger to my first image to change the state to disabled when clicked:

Again, to save time I copy and pasted this trigger onto each image:

In order to keep score, I needed a number variable which I created and called ‘Points’ and then I added a trigger to add points to the variable:

I was also able to copy and paste this trigger onto all my other images saving me some more time. Finally I added a reference to this variable in the bottom left corner %Points% that changes each time an image is pressed.

The only thing left was to make something happen when all of the people were chosen so I simply added a layer with the following trigger:

As the challenges are a good place to practice using Storyline, I also thought I’d try something that I haven’t done before which was to add an image as a background to the published HTML output (behind the Storyline project). I reused the stars image and this tutorial from David Anderson explains how to do it.

All up the demo took less than two hours hours to put together. You can see it for yourself by clicking on the image below to launch the demo:

Let me know what you think and you can see all of my ELH Challenge entries on My Portfolio page.

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September 20, 2015
Making Videos Interactive

Often when we talk about our work, we talk in terms of ‘what’ we did. The Showing My Work series of posts aim to also capture the ‘how’ something was done.

E-Learning Heroes Challenge #94 – Interactive Video: Visual Interviews in Online Training. The brief: This week your challenge is to create an interactive video interview.

Every so often David Anderson posts a weekly challenge that I know I want to participate in (even if it’s not in the current week) and this was one of those challenges. I haven’t done a whole lot with shooting my own videos (apart from the Smartphone Video challenge) so I wanted to have a go and complete this one at some point. I noticed that for some reason, there weren’t as many entries for this challenge and I wondered if folks thought that it would take too long or that they didn’t have the right equipment. My demo was put together fairly quickly (using myself as the victim, I mean subject, also saved some time) and my equipment was not high tech. While the result was a simple looking entry it still does the job and here’s how I did it.

On a recent plane trip for work, I mapped out my ideas on paper (as I usually like to do):

I didn’t want to create anything too big or too complex, so my idea was to use four questions and I would be in the centre of the screen with the questions around me. When you click on a question, the video answer would play. I also had an idea to add an ‘introduction’ clip which give some instruction as to what to do – so I’d need five clips altogether.

Over the past few weeks, I seen David and other Community members who had used video make them look more interesting by placing a cover over the video so that it didn’t have the standard rectangular video on a slide look. I really liked the idea and I wanted to try to do something similar. Here’s the slide with the video sitting on it:

and the same slide after the cover is put on:

I used PowerPoint to create my cover and the first thing I did was to set up my PPT slide in the same aspect ratio as my Storyline project (4:3). Then I inserted a rectangle the same size as the slide and then inserted a circle shape (with no fill) and positioned it in the centre of the rectangle. Then by selecting both shapes, I was able to use PowerPoint’s ‘Merge Shapes’ feature and ‘Combine’ to create a rectangle with a circular hole in the middle.

I filled the shape with my chosen blue colour and saved it as a picture that I was able to then insert into my Storyline project. I now had a cover!

In Storyline, the video intro sits on the slide itself (also known as the base layer) and each of the video answers sit on their own layer, so I also put my cover image on each layer too so that the demo would look the same as each layer is shown. I kept my questions simple and in keeping with the circle theme, I added four circles with a question in each. The triggers would be a simple ‘Show Layer’ when a question was clicked.

Now the framework of the demo was set and all I needed to do was record the video introduction along with the answers to each question. I don’t have a proper video camera or equipment, so I used Storyline’s ‘Record Webcam’ from the insert video options and recorded each of my answers using my laptop. As you can see my set up was very basic:

Yes, that’s our spare room which has all our clean washing that we need to put away (everyone has a room like that don’t they?) and my laptop is sitting on the clothes dryer to get the right height but you can’t tell from the clips although the sound quality could be better.

It took a few takes to get my eyes looking straight ahead and for me not to make a mistake with my answers, so it probably took about half an hour all up to record.

As I was putting the demo together, I had an idea that instead of separate video clips, I could include a GIF image of myself that would create the effect of me waiting for the next question. For this it sliced a five second clip of myself from one of my questions and went to a website called http://makeagif.com/ where I uploaded the clip and it created a looping GIF image for me that I could add into my demo.

Unfortunately this idea didn’t turn out as good as I would have liked for a couple of reasons, one was that the quality of the GIF wasn’t the same as the clips so it looked different and secondly I really needed to start and end each clip with the same pose and expression, which I tried to do but it didn’t quite work.

Because of this extra clip, I needed to add an extra layer to my project and the triggers became show the ‘GIF Layer’ after the introduction and then for each layer, it was show the ‘GIF Layer’ when the media completes (i.e. after each video on the layer had finished). So essentially the demo jumps from an answer layer to the GIF layer.

When I placed my videos on the slide and each layer, all I had to do was make sure the cover sat in from to the video file and adjust the position of the video so that my face is roughly in the middle of the circle.

After some testing and adding some animations I was ready to go. All up it took about four hours to put together and while it’s a simple demo, I think it works but you can see for yourself by clicking on the image below to launch the demo:

Let me know what you think and you can see all of my ELH Challenge entries on My Portfolio page.

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August 25, 2015
Spinning Around with Storyline 2

A few years ago, before I was working with Articulate Storyline, I saw this cool interaction where you could spin a group of on screen images around in a circle. I later found out that this was referred to as a ‘carousel’.

While I liked the carousel when I first saw it, I haven’t see it around much – the closest I’ve come is where the images scroll from side to side. So I thought I’d try and build a circular carousel in Storyline 2. In my head, the way I saw the interaction working was by using a slider and as you move the slider along the images would rotate in a circle.

I was on the train on my way into work the other day and I started to sketch out my idea on paper. I always like to start this way no matter if it’s for a client project or a simple demo like this was going to be. I find that I can jot down ideas quickly and play with them on paper as I try to arrange and re-arrange my thoughts. So this is how it started:

Then once I have a bit of a clearer idea of where I’m going (it’s never usually finished or fully formed at this point) then I’ll start playing in the tool however I’m still experimenting at this point and I don’t actually know if my idea will work!

To start with I inserted a slider and four coloured rectangles onto a new slide just to get an idea of the layout. To help with the look of the interaction, I made the two rectangles behind the front one slightly smaller and the back one slightly smaller again to give the look of perspective – as the objects move around the carousel they’ll appear to move closer and then further away.

Initially, I thought I’d use a change of state and what would happen is that as you move the slider along, each rectangle would change its state and the new state would be the rectangle in the next position. I started with just two different coloured rectangles (so that I could keep track of which was which). Plus if I started with two and could get it to work, then I could add the other two. It turned out to be a good plan because using states proved to be unsuccessful.

The first two moves worked just fine:

But the next two didn’t:

The problem was that objects on a slide sit at different ‘levels’ depending on where they are in the timeline and in this case the blue rectangle is always going to be above the red one:

So it was back to the drawing board.

This time I thought I’d try it again but using separate layers for each position of the rectangle. That way I could control how the rectangles were arranged as each layer is shown. Thankfully, this way worked much better. Each time the slider moved a position, a different layer would show and because the rectangles are in a new position on each layer it gives the effect that they are moving in a circle:

The next step was to replace the shapes with images and see how it looks. I also decided to add a couple of extra pictures – meaning two extra layers. I wanted to make the front picture stand out so I increased the brightness of the front image and changed the back images to black and white and decreased their brightness. I did this on one image and then used format painter to apply the changes to the other images. I also adjusted the layout and sizing of the images slightly and in the end it turned out like this:

Click the image to view the working demo.

While it isn’t exactly how I envisaged it originally (in my head I wanted the movement from position to position to be much smoother but would be much more complex to create given the objects change size as they move) this method does give a revolving effect and I was happy with the end result. Maybe I could try using motion paths next time…

I reckon the slide could be used for images or videos or even as a different type of menu where you could click on the front image and jump to a topic. You can download the source file from here.

Note: I also want to develop more of a habit of working out loud so I tweeted my progress as I went. It’s the first time I’ve done that as I went along and not just at the end. It’s my habit in progress.

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July 19, 2015
Evolution
It has been a while since my last blog post. In fact, it’s been so long that I had to have my password reset so I could login. I’ve had an exciting start to this year and a lot has been going on. But I’ll get to that.

A little over a year ago I had a stable job that was close to home and one that if I kept my head down and did what I was told, I could have been there for life. However, it wasn’t particularly challenging, the leadership was uninspiring and I wasn’t feeling satisfied with what I was doing. The thing that kept me going was the big wide world of people I’d discovered who existed beyond the confines of my organisation, thanks to social media. There were (and still are) big thinkers, idea challengers, problem solvers, self-promoters, experience sharers, community creators, industry leaders and what some have become – virtual friends.

Around this time I also scribbled down a few career goals as I needed to do something if I was going change my circumstances. I’d never been much of a goal setter, definitely not in a write-it-down-and-draw-up-an-action-plan kind of way. But I wrote them down and here they are (keep in mind that they’re eLearning related):
- Get a job with an eLearning company
- Do more ELH Challenges
- Become an Articulate Community Super Hero!
- Create a stronger eLearning community in Australia (this is a work in progress).
In terms of a plan, all I really did was jump in, join in twitter chats, read other people’s blogs, comment from time-to-time, share what I found interesting, connect and follow others, look at what others who’d been around for while did and copy them and start my own blog (which itself has evolved into this site). What did that do for me? Apart from learning lots, it got me noticed. In a good way. I wasn’t particularly special but I was visible and that was an advantage I had of most others in the learning field.

By the end of last year I had achieved three of my four goals (the top three) just by being involved and getting noticed. Doors and opportunities opened up that wouldn’t have been possible if I didn’t change my career trajectory. In my new eLearning role at a great company, I’m able work from home with one day a week in the office. I’m back into eLearning development which has (and continues to) sharpen my skills. I now get to travel to different parts of Australia to teach others how to use Articulate Storyline and I also now look after our Master eLearning Course helping others to learn how to create great eLearning. I’m also encouraged, yes encouraged, to be active on social media and in various communities both physical and online.

Due to these changes I’ve been busy, hence the lack of blogging (I do have a notebook that contains many half-baked ideas). My perspective of others working in the eLearning industry has evolved because while I’m working in one organisation, I’m interacting with people working at the coal-face. I now hear about the challenges people face within their own organisations and have a better understanding for where they need to build their skills. Generally speaking, the focus needs to shift from ‘This is what you should be doing’ to ‘This is how you do this’.

For myself, new skill sets are emerging – public speaking, webinar delivery, resource creation and curation. I guess these will become my new goals. Finding time can be hard but I need to make time and be more disciplined with using my time effectively.

So, as my career has evolved so too has my thinking. I know this will continue. I have many ideas planned I just need to make them happen. I’ll probably need you to be involved too…..

Image source: shutterstock.com

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July 5, 2015