The Usable Suspects

By Jon

This week’s E-Learning Heroes Challenge is Using Dials and Sliders to Select E-Learning Characters.

Using avatars and characters in e-learning is a powerful way to personalise your course. Giving your learner the ability to select and customise a character can increase engagement and help bring a topic to life. Identifying with an avatar means the learner has ‘skin in the game’ and interacting with other characters can unlock advanced elements of gamification.

I’ve always wanted to build a course where your choice of avatar or character influences the events, flow and difficulty of the course. This week’s challenge was a chance to experiment with this concept.

If you follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn you will know that I contracted Covid-19 at Christmas and have only recently returned to work. While I was recuperating, I watched a LOT of classic movies, which provided the inspiration for this week’s demo.

This week's @ELHChallenge is 𝗨𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗗𝗶𝗮𝗹𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗦𝗹𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗦𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗘-𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀. I watched a LOT of classic movies while recuperating from Covid-19 recently, which inspired this demo.#Storyline360 #Vyond pic.twitter.com/Cvm6PCnXPN
— ᴊ ᴏ ɴ ᴀ ᴛ ʜ ᴀ ɴ_ʜ ɪ ʟ ʟ (@DevByPowerPoint) January 24, 2021

Where possible, I prefer to create full screen ‘chromeless’ courses with all of the controls placed within the slide. (This can also make your course easier to use on smaller screens.) However, this does present its own challenges in terms of where you place controls or buttons.

For this demo to perform as intended, I needed to place five Vyond animations on one slide and switch them on and off using a single slider. While layers can be used to show or hide a selection of different video clips, ensuring the same slider control appears over multiple layers is trickier to pull off.

In Storyline 360 most objects can be given a ‘hidden’ state, but not videos. A workaround is to use animated GIFs instead. These can be hidden, which allows you keep everything on one slide, reduce ‘load lag’ and make the interaction simpler to build and slicker to use.

Happily, Vyond allows you to export your animations in GIF format, up to 854 x 480px. Be aware though, that GIFs cannot be compressed and larger GIFs may be slower to load and ruin the effect you are trying to create.

In this video you can see the triggers that I used to show or hide each GIF using a single slider control.

A quick word about sliders

Sliders are a versatile control that can be used in a variety of ways. However, on mobile devices and touch screens they can be a bit ‘sticky’.

For this reason, I usually combine sliders with hotspots, allowing the learner to simply press the screen rather than drag the slider.

I describe this method in more detail here.

To Infinity and Vyond!

Getting to grips with #Vyond while also helping my daughter with her lockdown homework. Win win! She's great at voiceover - One Take Tilly! pic.twitter.com/KULZykiTue
— ᴊ ᴏ ɴ ᴀ ᴛ ʜ ᴀ ɴ_ʜ ɪ ʟ ʟ (@DevByPowerPoint) January 24, 2021

I have only recently started using Vyond, but have found it quick and easy to use. It has an impressive range of animations, props and stock characters and the ability to create your own characters is a lot of fun. This allowed me to quickly create simple caricatures of the cast of The Usual Suspects.