Storyline - Best thing since sliced bread!
April 06, 2017
Storyline - Best thing since sliced bread!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Articulate Storyline
All members of our instructional design team utilize Articulate Storyline to build courses and assessments. We have built a variety of corporate, clinical, and IT courses in SL2 including attestations, pre and post assessments for ILT programs, scenario-based and choose your own adventure courses, PowerPoint conversions, and compliance programs. Storyline allows our development team to produce fast, high quality courses that meet our ever changing and growing needs of the business. We chose Storyline over other rapid-authoring tools because of its user-friendliness, community support, training opportunities, and access to free templates and resources.
- Support - The Articulate staff is extremely responsive and helpful. The E-Learning Heroes Community is, IMO, the absolute best user driven support community in the e-learning space.
- Scalable functionality - You can use SL to quickly convert powerpoint files to interactive e-learning programs, or you can create complex learning experiences with SL's variables and javascript features.
- User Friendliness - The menu bars and overall UX design mirrors Microsoft Office, so it's relatively easy to operate.
- I would like to see more graphics functionality similar to powerpoint within Storyline. Some examples are - Merging shapes, removing backgrounds from images, and blurring images. If some of these basic things were added, I would be able to do almost all my graphics work within the tool itself.
- The feedback masters of Storyline 2 are inconsistent in applying the master formatting to layers. Button states are not accurately applied, which means going in to each slide and layer to make individual changes. This can make the QA process quite cumbersome.
- Fullscreen functionality for videos through a button or some other means would be a great value add as well.
- Storyline could be even better and improve user-workflow if there were more options to set defaults for the program. Examples including setting a default Story size (program defaults to 4:3, but all my projects are 16:9, so I have to change that every time I start a new project), and setting the default font and paragraph formatting.
- We implemented a flipped classroom model for some of our training programs, and in some cases, we were able to reduce our instructor-led training time from four hours to one.
For me, it came down to UX design, and user-friendliness. The other software solutions I would categorize as Storyline competitors either involved too many clicks or actions to accomplish the same goals as Storyline, or their UX was too cumbersome and not as user-friendly as Storyline. Some of the other solutions may have different or better features, but how many clicks or actions are you willing to add to your daily workflow in order to use those features?