Adobe Captivate - A challenging experience
October 05, 2022
Adobe Captivate - A challenging experience
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Captivate
Our company decided to use Adobe Captivate to begin creating eLearning content for our customers to supplement our instructor-led and video training. We hope to utilize self-paced learning to introduce concepts to our clients before they enter the IL training space so they can get the most out of their time with a live instructor. To this end, we have created several courses that cover the basics of our software. Each course uses the "software simulation" portion of Adobe Captivate, along with some knowledge check questions.
- Software simulation
- Branching
- Customization
- Templates. There seem to be "themes," but Adobe Captivate has a terrible time saving any sort of object preferences which makes it really difficult when a set of courses need to follow branding guidelines. I have to create a basic course and set up all my colors and whatnot and start every course using that.
- Ease of use. It is like pulling teeth sometimes to get Adobe Captivate to do things. You may be able to get it to do it, but it'll be like a dozen or more steps which make creating courses incredibly tedious.
- A bigger focus on software simulation. Adobe Captivate isn't designed for simulation, I get that, and I am happy it does as much as it does. However, it could be better to capture actions and things within a program. For instance, click and drag options and hot-key combinations.
- Software simulation
- Theming/branding
- Consistency
- Ease of Use
- Price point - it is very cheap compared to others
- Familiarity - I am very comfortable with other Adobe products, so Adobe Captivate was an easy choice
- Ease of use - this is negative; it has taken me a long time to get up and running and document how things work so other users in my department can create courses consistently
Compared to a program like PowerPoint, Adobe Captivate is much more robust but also more complicated. However, I find thinking of Adobe Captivate as "PowerPoint on steroids" is a good way of thinking about the program. If you can build a PP slide deck, you can probably build a basic Adobe Captivate course. I also used Flash in the distant past, and in comparison, I feel like Adobe Captivate is MUCH LESS intimidating than Flash was, so that's a major positive.
Do you think Adobe Captivate delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Adobe Captivate's feature set?
Yes
Did Adobe Captivate live up to sales and marketing promises?
No
Did implementation of Adobe Captivate go as expected?
No
Would you buy Adobe Captivate again?
Yes