5 Reasons Why Storyline 360 Rocks!
Rapid Authoring tools have grown up in a big way with the release of Articulate’s Storyline 360. This article looks at our favourite new features in market-leading software.
1. Content Library Integration | Browse Content Library character and templates right from within Storyline 360.
The new Content Library is easy to access and fits nice and snug into your workflow so there’s no longer the need to jump out of Storyline to find characters or templates. I love the fact that there are so many more options for characters too, no longer is it just 300 different versions of Atsumi. Plus, the filtering system is genius, so it’s easy to find exactly what you need for your course.
While the templates on offer are definitely slicker than those bundled with the likes of Captivate, I’d still love more diversity (especially when it comes to exciting new interactions like the new Dial).
2. New Trigger Actions |The new triggers have really opened windows and doors. Storyline 360 introduces the new ‘object intersects’ trigger that expand the realms of gamification and engagement — I imagine awesome mazes and puzzles full of wonderful creatures and characters.
These new triggers just make me greedy for more!
3. Dial Interactions | Add interactive dials to let learners manipulate data, explore cause-and-effect relationships, control objects and navigation, and more. Choose from a gallery of customisable dials or create your own with shapes and pictures.
The new dials blend together an adorable, fun interaction with new learning opportunities and styles. I love this new interaction and how customisable it is. They’re similar to the sliders from Storyline 2 but with some great added bonuses — the new format is really great for learning about things like temperature or volume, or really anything with a cyclical pattern (something that definitely couldn’t have been accomplished in a simple slider).
4. Responsive Capabilities | The responsive player, that adapts to different devices, the ability to see how your course will look and behave on any device and orientation and the ability to control which mobile device orientation learners can use to view your course.
The responsive capabilities in Storyline 360 have definitely piqued my interest. The Storyline built-in buttons have become dynamic and responsive, which is awesome. It’s great to see some love for mobile finally. The responsive preview is also a really cool feature because you can view your designs and interactions on any screen — without having to publish and upload. My absolute favourite feature of Storyline 360 though, is the Orientaton Restriction. Finally, we have the ability to lock our courses to an orientation and for different devices which is just mindblowing! The orientation prompts that tell the user they need to rotate their device are so fresh and so damn clean. I can’t even… seriously.
5. New Ways to Publish | Publish to Articulate 360 to collect feedback, publish your course as HTML5-only, Flash-only or both and publish only what you need — slides, scenes or entire projects.
I’m absolutely in love with this new Publish to Articulate 360 feature. For anyone without an LMS or even lacking the time to upload their courses to an LMS every time they want to test something, this is a godsend. It’s only one simple step to publish straight to an online portal where you can invite reviewers with a simple link.
The Publish Formats option is also really great; since it’s stretching out the customisability of publishing. Finally, the Section Publishing is amazing. Definitely something I never would have asked for but am so glad it’s a thing. It adds workflow efficiencies, faster publishing time and the ability to publish multiple courses from a single ‘.story’ file.
Overall, Storyline 360 has added some exciting features for an industry screaming out for more modern tools. As a designer and developer, it’s easy to see that Storyline 360 is a step in the right direction — I can’t wait to see what they release next!
