Creating self-guided tour navigation

Report · May 22, 2017

Hi all,

My boss has asked me to create a shortened self-guided tour of my e-Learning project so I duplicated it and stripped it back to about 5% of its total number of slides and added a pointing finger on top of each slide to the place where I wanted him to click next, when demonstrating the eGuide.

Creating the separate "lite" version for my boss got me thinking that this could be an awesome way to help participants to see a quick overview of the whole course. It would be great for our company staff demonstrating it as well as students, who are new to the eGuide, learning what's in it. FYI, my eGuide is a post training reference guide and is not a linear training course.

So, I was thinking about having a "Take a quick tour" button on the Home slide of the project.

Now, how to BEST/EASILY execute the "tour-guide" nav (where slide Nav already exists) is the big question.

I could possibly create a "TourGuide=ON" variable that is called on entry to each of the "TOUR slides", which will Show a second set of nav buttons over the top of the original nav buttons (plus perhaps an info box or two) to control their movement. I'd have to Hide them once I moved onto the next slide. Perhaps different STATES could be used to overlay tour-based content, rather than using hide/show actions.

OR

I could create a series of advanced scripts that just passes the football along from slide to slide (hiding the previous slide tour elements and showing the following slide tour elements before they arrived) but that kinda looks like a lotta manual labour to set up.

I'm thinking someone has already climbed this mountain so I thought I would ask before I leaped down the wrong crevasse.

Your thoughts are most appreciated!

Regards,

Brett

Report · May 22, 2017

Just some comments, never created a project like that.

Never have interactive objects covering each other, you need to hide/disable and show/enable to be sure it will be functional for both SWF and HTML5 output. You could create two navigation groups of buttons, to make the conditional action based on a user variable shorter. However you cannot disable/enable a group of buttons, only hide/show. I mention disable/enable to be on the safe side, because had issues in the past when interactive objects were in the same location and hide/show was not sufficient. You can avoid this complication by having the to navigation groups in different locations on the slides. I didn't double-check, but maybe having one group on master slides (for the big project) and the other group on the individual slides (o sometimes timed for a number of slides) could help as well.

You can use multistate buttons to give the Normal state another 'look', but the other InBuilt states (Rollover, down, and in CP10 Visited) will remain the same. I wonder if this is acceptable?

Report · May 22, 2017

Thanks for your suggestions Lilybiri!

Yes, I've got a few buttons on top of other buttons that I hide/show and found that I had to separate them enough by other objects (eg one button all the way up front and the other button near the bottom) for them to work. I hadn't thought of also setting them to enable/disable, though this would require me adding an advanced action to both, seeing they have to do 2 actions. My problem is space, so having the buttons on top of each other is kinda essential.

It's a crying shame the states function doesn't allow you to paste items into them. What a bloody pain! I truly don't want to have to re-create my buttons from scratch, just to get them inside a state. This seems like a glaring oversight to me.

I'll have a play with the multistate buttons just to see how they function - haven't tried them yet.

Many thanks,

Brett

Report · May 23, 2017

You can drag images from the Library in a state£. You can also copy/paste between states when you are in the object State panel.

Have a look at this blog post where I used multistate shape buttons:

1 action = 5 Toggle Buttons - Captivate blog