Storyline 360

After an extended sabbatical, I am happy to return to this blog. Work, TW5212, EL6072 and a dissertation take a toll, and let's not forget a gaggle of children suddenly permanently at home. Question, how do you convince children that this is not a holiday?

In any case, after making fairly ludicrous promices in my EL6072 proposal I set about Storyline 360 this week in an attempt to rescue some credibility.

First impressions, on a Lee & Owens scale of touch and feel, this is a delicious software package. It's colouring, typeface and delivery are all non-challenging, welcoming, genuinely good.

There are help buttons and videos on constant and massive supply. The interface is typical Microsoft, it will be very familiar to anyone who has switched a computer on. OK, some of the concepts are a little alien, but that is true of any new thing.

I'm not keen on masses of instructions, except when it comes to flat pack furniture, and it was good to be able to jump straight in and produce something meaningful. Very encouraging.

On first impressions though, what was missing was a basic getting started, I know it's there somewhere, but it didn't leap out at me. If there was a handy video, or even written instructions that immediately broke the fear barrier the experience would be improved.

Instead Microsoft have "heroes". This is a much overused word I feel. There is nothing very heroic about being paid to explain a software package, in fact as consumers we would expect this as a minimum?

Are the heroes any good, that is another question.

I want to include videos in my resource, no big deal there, that's easy. But I want them to be full screen so that an individual on a phone can access the resource, I want them to have the usual controls.

That's where it begins to unravel. That function doesn't exist in Storyline. There are a quite a few heroes not looking so Herculean out there. Intsead users have suggested various tweeks, some work some do not. That's not good.

The ability to have full screen should be an obvious and immediate requirement, surely - accessibility, general use, different devices, the list is endless.

The way to get round this is to use layers, but that becomes cumbersome although possible. That the controls can only be added to the bottom of the video mean that you have to scale the video as well, it is either thumb nail or say 85% full screen if you want some controls to feature.

Of course you can add controls by adding triggers, but there would be may be an extra dozen, and why should you have to.

Another area where Storyline 360 unravels is the available media, photos, etc. Now, to me this was really disappointing. It is just glorified clip art (remember that) and I'm afraid I will not be using much. The problem really is that the images are on the whole banal, and we've seen them all before - they are of a kind, and easilly identifiable. I would urge caution in their use.

One area that seems to be overlooked quite readilly and regularly in online resources in particular, is the use of images, icons etc. More consideration needs to be given to target audience and salience, and this isn't helped by Storyline 360 library - I've seen it all before.

This then means that a reliance on say Google for visual resources becomes appararent quite quickly. No problem there except the editing functions in Storyline 360 are rudimentary.

Hmmmmm. Quite a lot for those heroes to think about, I was somehow expecting more.

This weekend, it is animations and quizzes.