eLearning Heroes #413
This past weekend, I worked on the latest eLearning Heroes challenge: Using Lightbox Slides for Performance Support. I wobbled on ideas for my first hour (I only give myself five) and then settled on a topic I know a little about (but still researched and consulted a friend who is a veterinarian): What people foods dogs can or can’t eat.
You can check out my project:
You can see a video walkthrough below:
Let’s go “under to hood” a bit, if you’re new at all to Storyline or still learning some workflows and like to see how other people do stuff, the next video will show my actual Story file. Lightboxes are a built in feature that’s easy to use (you just click “Lightbox” and pick a slide in triggers). The slides you are lightboxing are just designed normally as slides, and Storyline does the lightbox and close button for you (you can edit some of this with JavaScript, though I didn’t in this case).
I find lightboxes a bit of a challenge not to actual navigation but to my view of navigation and I tend to sort them into their own scenes, as you can see in the video. I also tend to favor tabbing over lightboxing in many cases personally. To overcome the constant “open and closing” feeling of lightboxes, I added some buttons so users could next/previously through the different examples. Of course, the challenge has given me some new ideas on how to use lightboxes (though a lot of the most fun ones aren’t really about training as usual and the reality is I might not get much chance to use them). However, I think if someone is new, lightboxes may actually be easier than tabbing to do well. I will often build custom “light box” appearing slides into tabs (which you can do bespoke) and this feature does that for you. Very useful!
