Conversations (#90)
The challenge was design a ‘conversation.’
The idea here was to design a situation in which you appear to be speaking with the learner. Good challenge! Any challenge that involves audio gets my vote! My subject is cycling in traffic.
Click here to view the sample.
I wrote a storyboard for this because it involves narration and branching. I can’t just make up narration and branching requires serious planning. Immediately, I learned my storyboard template doesn’t work well for branching scenarios, so I modified it on the fly to make my intentions clear: jumping around from one slide to another, to continue the conversation, gets confusing. I’m still not satisfied with my template and I’ll have to clean it up for client work. Good to know.
I added a text box for visitors familiar with cycling. They don’t need to go through the training, but we’d sure like to hear from them!
This text box works but your text doesn’t actually go anywhere. It’s just a sample, after all.
Recording the audio is never a problem. But once it was loaded into Storyline I realized how verbose it was! I used Storyline’s audio editor to cut great swaths of narration because I’m very conscious of this audience. This is just a sample and you don’t want to hear the details about the studies that show cycling is faster if you don’t live too far from work.
I included a “start again” button in case you want to try a different path. This is not something I would include in a real project; once the user has made a choice, they should head down only one path. I made the introduction slide much shorter than originally planned, because if you do ‘start again’, it’s tedious to have to listen to me ramble again. I took out most of the ramble.
‘Start Again’ was added in case visitors want to take a different path through the conversation.
I think it’s awesome that Storyline can handle more than one audio file on the same slide! I added some chirpy-birds to the final slide.
Storyline allows more than one audio file on a slide.
The challenge was to design a ‘conversation.’
Click this image to launch the sample ‘conversation’.
The graphics are comps from iStock. Any un-watermarked photos are mine.