Slide Layer, Base Layer, Revisiting Properties

Audio Transcription

Hello and welcome back to the third section of Articulate Storyline training series.

In the previous video we have seen, “Slide layer properties under visibility section”. In this video, we will see layer properties under sections – “Base layer” and “Revisits”.

Let’s open layer properties and see the first property under the base layer section. Here we have the option “Prevent user from clicking on the base layer”. As the name suggests, enabling this option restricts the learner from clicking on any interactive objects on the base layer.

For instance, let’s look at this question slide. When the learner selects an option and clicks on submit, they will see a feedback pop-up on the first incorrect attempt. Normally all the feedback pop-ups are created inside slide layers and they are displayed based on the learner’s response.

But in this slide, we have a problem. When the “Try again” pop up is shown, learner is still able to select the options or click the submit button present on the base layer. This can lead to unexpected issues or confusion.

So to avoid that, we can go to layer properties of the feedback layers and enable the option “prevent user from clicking on the base layer”.

Let’s preview again.

Now, the learner is restricted from clicking on the base layer objects until they click OK to close the feedback layer. That’s how, this property can come in handy when creating such interactions.

Next, we have “Pause timeline of base layer” option

Let me demonstrate this with an example. When this slide starts playing, if the learner opens the course menu, the slide animations still continues to play. A good Instructional Design approach would be to stop the animation when any popup window opens.

In order to do so let us go back to the slide layer properties and then enable the pause timeline on base layer property. When you enable this property for a layer, the timeline for the base layer will pause whenever that layer is displayed on the screen.

So let’s preview and check this again. As you can see, this time the base layer stops when the menu layer appears on the screen.

And next, we have revisiting section. In this section we have, “when revisiting property”. This is quite similar to the revisiting property in slide properties section which we have seen in the slide properties video.

For instance if you look at this interactive slide, when we click on “know more” button, this layer appears with two tabs in it. In order to return to base layer, we need to click both the tabs. Only then the next button appears which will take us back to the base layer.

But when we revisit this layer, it starts over and we need to click these tabs once again in order to go back to the base layer. This is because, the layer’s revisiting property is set to “Reset to initial state”. So, we need to change this to “Resume saved state”

Then Storyline remembers the layers we already visited and on revisit, it starts playing from where we left off. We also have “automatically decide” option, which is the default option for this property.

If we leave it to automatically decide, storyline will decide whether to reset or resume. It makes the decision based on the objects present inside the layer. If the layer has some interactive objects such as buttons then storyline will resume upon revisit, else it will start over.

As our layer has these two interactive buttons, we will get the same output as “Resume saved state” when automatically decide is selected for this layer.

With this we have come to the end of this section. In the next section we will learn how to use Timeline, States and, notes tab in storyline.