Storyline Speed and Efficiency Tips

Introduction

Speed and efficiency are crucial when you are designing any kind of learning experience. If you are a teacher, you know you could easily spend days planning one lesson and if you are an instructional designer or e-learning developer, you know how easy it is to spend days developing one grand and mind blowing interaction. We just don’t always have that time available, not to mention having to meet deadlines.

Here are a few tips to everyone who is looking to speed up their Storyline e-learning development process and increase their efficiency.

Tip #1

Plan wisely – understand the limitations

The more carefully planned a screen is, the more easy it is going to be to design and finalise it. One of the most time consuming (and often annoying) things to do in Storyline is redesigning a slide after realising what you imagined is impossible or too difficult to build. While storyboards aim to prevent this issue, there is not always enough time to draft a very detailed one.

Even though planning sounds obvious, I’ve run into the problem of spending a lot of time creating something and then realising that it would take far too long to develop. It’s important to be able to roughly estimate how long it is going to take to build something in Storyline and to be able to say “no” before going down a rabbit hole. Sometimes less is more.

While this ability usually comes with practice, it helps a lot if you keep a couple of things in mind:

• How much information you want to present on the screen

• What kind of images, graphs, icons you are planning to use

• If you would like to animate them

• How the learner will interact with the learning experience

• How the slide fits into the context and / or aligns with the main learning objectives

I'm sure there are many other things to consider before starting the development process, so it can be useful to create a checklist for this.

Tip #2

Keyboard shortcuts

Some examples:

CTRL + T --> create a textbox

CTRL + A --> highlight all the elements on the screen

CTRL + J --> insert an image

CTRL + G --> group the selected objects

Hold CTRL + item 1 + item 2 + item 3 + item X --> highlight a number of objects on the screen.

And usual Windows shortcuts like – CTRL + Z to undo your last action, CTRL + Y to redo something, CTRL + C copy, CTRL + V paste.

For the full list of shortcuts visit the official website. Check out this video to see some keyboard shortcuts in action.

Tip #3

Using the timeline effectively

Some tricks include:

Highlighting multiple items on the timeline allows you to move them to a specific point together and not having to drag them one by one.

Instead of dragging an item to where you want, you can also insert a new object wherever your pointer is on the timeline by just leaving the marker at a specific point when you add a new item.

Operating with fading in and fading out can help you create a mini video effect by shortening the length of the object on the timeline. I many times find this much easier and quicker than creating triggers for specific actions and figuring out how exactly things should interact at what point.

And last but not least animating separate lines in a paragraph. If you follow him or have completed his course on LinkedIn, you would have seen Tim Slade share this tip last week. This feature enables you to animate various lines in a paragraph separately without having to create new text boxes for them one by one. Anyone who has dealt with courses which involve presenting bullet-pointed text will know how useful this feature is.

If you would like to see more of these kind of tips, have a look at Tim’s course by clicking on this link.

Tip #4

States, triggers or variables?

Similarly to tip #1 (‘Plan wisely’) when you get to the stage of actually starting inserting images, characters, objects on your screen, you need to make a few important decisions.

Would you like to use layers, states, new slides, triggers, variables or none? All of them have their place in the design process, but it’s important to differentiate and learn to make wise decisions about which one to use and when. Sometimes it’s okay to have one layer and create new states for the text and images you have, whereas sometimes it’s much quicker to add a new layer and start afresh instead of over-populating one screen.

A simple real-life example for this could be the following situation: there are two or more characters on your screen and they are having a conversation. What solution would you use here to create this interaction without spending too much time on it? See the example below:

There are various choices, but in my opinion the worst option is to do everything on the same slide because that would require the most amount of triggers, states and settings. Instead it is much easier to have new layers for the new roles so that you can start with a “clean” slide/layer instead of worrying about the huge number of triggers that you need to create and align.

Tip #5

The power of duplicating

It can take a long time to create a new interaction. The good news is that once you’ve done them, you can replicate the screens as many times as you want. No doubt, repetition can be boring but if you want to use the same type of assessment screen, it’s necessary to do some copying.

Make sure the object or slide you would like to multiply has all the settings before you copy it. You don’t want to double your own workload, right?

This might be another obvious piece of advice for some, but it took me a while to find the best moment for starting a new slide. It happened more than once that I copied things too early and I had to make changes on both, or start editing the original slide again which created extra work.

Another tip would be to copy paste objects after you’ve finalised editing the states of it. I made the mistake of setting the states for the new objects one by one instead of leaving it to the very end of the process when I would have only had to multiply the fully developed object.

Conclusion

While Articulate Storyline takes a long time to master one of its best features is the variety of options available to customise and tailor the courses we create according to our or our learners’ preferences. If you want to be able to work with the software as efficiently as possible, it is quite useful to learn some tricks which can save time for you and enable you to focus on other areas of your design which play a crucial role in creating a complex learning experience.

What are your speed tricks and tips for Storyline?