Reviews and feedback are critical to making any project a success. That feedback coming in a meaningful and useful way can be challenging, especially when faced with timelines and with several content experts. By the time a project is at the development phase of an eLearning project, many decisions should be final. However, feedback is still very important at this stage, and not always easy to document.
To make this easier on our review team, we recently implemented Storyline Word exports as a part of our publishing process. The fine folks at Articulate have an excellent tutorial on this process, if you haven’t already, you should check it out! We incorporated this into our process by having the review team that would normally just be looking at the Storyline file, now incorporate the Word export into the process and mark that document with their feedback. That way we have documentation of what changes need to be made or any side discussions that are happening about specific interactions that may need re-work.
As with any tool, there are a few limitations. Let’s look at a few tips to get you started on Storyline reviews with Word exports:
Use JavaScript Sparingly
This is my MO with Storyline in general. It is a powerful tool, but when you can use a simple layer, use a layer. The reason here is that you will not see your fancy scripted out interaction in the Word export, and neither will your review team who doesn’t understand your awesome script that you put a lot of work into. Nice, clean, individual layers that are named well are good practice in the first place. If you make them clean in Storyline, they will show up clean on your word export.
Turn Off the Notes Option
There is likely no reason your review team needs to see your Storyline notes. If you pulled your file from a template, they might see notes from an old project, and this can be confusing for your review team. Uncheck this little box, and you will save a few headaches in the long run.
Be Deliberate with Screen Numbers
Screen numbers can be a useful way to make easy reference to specific screens. If your team is organized when setting up a project, those screens should make sense when compared with the original scripts and storyboards. This will make it easy to make any universal changes that need to be made to both the Storyline files and the script if necessary. This is also very handy if your team has to deal with translations at any point in the lifecycle of your eLearning project. Screen numbers show up on Word exports, it is important that they make sense from the beginning of the project until the end of the project.
This process is super userful for reviews near the end of your process. When you are starting, we recommend a lot of the same concepts for designing elearning using a storyboard template.
