It ain't cheap, but it's worth every penny.
January 30, 2019
It ain't cheap, but it's worth every penny.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Articulate Storyline
We use Articulate Storyline to develop online learning courses that are deployed to our LMS. I do not know if it is being used by other departments, but I would imagine that it is. Everyone in our department uses it. Although it happened before I joined the department, I believe that management made the decision to use Storyline when Adobe announced that they would no longer support Flash.
- The UI closely resembles the general UI that is used by Microsoft Office products. It is instantly familiar, decreasing the learning curve.
- Storyline is very powerful. If you can imagine the design, you can develop it in Storyline. The built-in templates and player skins offer a wide variety of page layouts. I particularly like how Storyline organizes slides by scenes and provides a visual map to help you see the course navigation.
- Storyline is not a resource hog. You can't simply install it on any machine, but you do not need a tricked-out rig with gaming specs to run. It runs very smoothly on an Intel i5 with 8gb of RAM with plenty of system resources available for Microsoft Office and Adobe applications to run in different windows.
- Storyline output HTML is very clean. With other authoring tools, bad Javascript and poor CSS output really had a negative impact as you had to devise workarounds and implement patches for them to work with your LMS. Storyline is the closest authoring tool that I've found "just works."
- I wish that you could customize the UI ribbons to bring features you use frequently to the front and to hide options you rarely use.
- It would be great if there was a way for non-technical collaborators (SMEs, management, etc) to be able to open a *.story file directly and provide comments. You currently have to publish the course, load it to the LMS, update the LMS, and then hope that users can find it in the LMS. A Storyline Viewer/Previewer standalone application would be awesome.
- The price is too high for freelancers to purchase and use. I no longer contract and work exclusively for the firm, but even with our resources, the high price limits the number of licenses available to use.
- We are able to provide more training to learners online to better prepare them for home office training.
- We can quickly update content when needed, articulate provides flexibility.
- Storyline allows instructional designers to envision more complex and engaging courses leading to richer learning experiences.
The learning curve for using Storyline is not nearly as steep as it is with Captivate or Flash. Ultimately, it was not my decision to use Storyline, but I am glad that Storyline is the tool that my leaders chose. The UI in much more intuitive than Lectora, and the code is much cleaner.