Story telling with adobe Captivate

Telling a story - IPTV Topics

I have been to many clients' presentations where the presenter executed his presales pitch with PowerPoint slides. In most cases, the presenter will reuse slides that are stock presentation materials prepared by the company's global marketing department. Although the slides would make a good presentation, this process suffered these drawbacks :- 

1. It can only tell a common theme; one decided by the marketing team

2. The content is not localized

3. It does not tell the story; one that is wanted by the client

The above observation was confirmed when I was asked by a manager of a telco operator during my IPTV customization training session recently regarding the features available in the Multiscreen TV solution. The manger gave me the feedback that the Multiscreen TV solution is a very simple product.  I then realized that the presales activity did not accomplish its purpose of educating the client fully of what features are available in the product. Without knowing the capabilities of the product, the attendees of the presales pitch could not cascade to the rest of the company (especially the delivery and marketing team) the tools & features the operator can use to market their services. 

With this in mind, I started this project of telling a more compelling story to would be clients of the Multiscreen TV solution. The objective is to educate telco operators of available features of the Multiscreen TV solution.  I wanted to present a group of information to the user and allow the user to learn each feature. For this project, I grouped my information as topics.

• TV broadcast

• Services

• VoD (Video On Demand)

• Customization

• Timeshift

  

IPTV Topics

Navigation in Captivate

The first task of my project is to allow users to navigate through my slides to explore each topic. Captivate provides navigation capability through the following interaction tools; namely Button, Click box, Learning Interactions (interactive widgets) and Drag & Drop.  

Note: The last option Drag & Drop interaction object is not available for responsive project. 

The following navigation options are available to your end user:-

• Return to the last visited slide.

• Goto to the previous slide

• Goto to the next slide

• Jump to a specific slide. 

These navigation paths are illustrated below. Note that there is a subtle difference between go back to the previous slide and return to the last visited slide. The effect is illustrated in the diagram below.

Jump to slide: Slide 1 to Slide 3

Goto next slide: Slide 3 to Slide 4

Goto prev slide: Slide 4 back to Slide 3

Goto next slide: Slide 4 to Slide 5

Goto prev slide: Slide 5 back to slide 4

Return to last visited slide: Slide 5 returned to Slide 1

You can navigate your slides by using a button. In the Actions tab, you can perform any of the above option.

Navigation options

Another navigation technique that I often used is Click box. To navigate my slides,  I draw a click box over an existing background image; e.g. a map. Then I could specify any of above navigation option.

Best practice hint: Naming your slides will make it easy for you to identify the next slide you want to jump to.

And there is more!  You can even use an existing smart object as an interactive object. Set the "Use as Button" will turn a normal smart object to an interactive smart object. There will be an additional tab added to the object properties namely the "Actions tab".

Converting a normal smart shape object to an interactive object

Besides the navigation options in the action tab, you can also set any of the navigation action as part of the action in the "Execute Advanced Actions" or "Execute Shared Actions".

Navigation options as part of Actions

For my project, I wanted to describe each of the feature of IPTV; e.g. the VoD (Video On Demand) features. One way to illustrate the description of each feature is to implement an accordion-like slide in your presentation. In your slide, you have a set of buttons. The feature title is illustrated by a button and clicking on the button will show the description of the feature.

Option 1 - Learning Interaction

Adobe Captivate has a few stock standard objects that may be suitable for this task. These are the "Learning Interactions" widgets namely

• Accordion
• Tab control
• Glossary

Learning Interactions Widgets

My first impression is "Viola!"; Without any significant effort, I can complete my slides with the Accordion widget.

Accordion Widget in action

I soon discovered a limitation on the widgets; I cannot add more than a certain number of buttons to the widgets. These limitations are shown below:-

• Accordion - maximum 5 buttons
• Tab - maximum 5 buttons
• Process Circle - maximum 6 buttons
• Circle Matrix - maximum 8 buttons
• Glossary - no limit

Option 2 - Roll your own - simple Advanced Actions

To circumvent this limitation, I have to  resort to roll my own implementation. Adobe Captivate provides a set of programmable tools to create a more advanced interaction and customizable presentation. These tools are 

• Advanced Actions
• Variables

You can access  the Advanced Actions by selecting the "Execute Advanced Actions" or "Execute Shared Actions" from your Actions tab in your object properties tab. For Variables, you can create your own variables from the Project + Variables menu item.

Creating a User Variable

Best practice hint: the user variable name should describe the purpose of the variable. 

My first attempt used 8 buttons as the feature titles, 8 text captions as the feature descriptions and a group of smart shapes as the background of the feature descriptions. I chose a text caption to enter my text of the feature because it is very intuitive (WYSIWYG).

Accordion objects

Clicking on each button will show the appropriate text caption and hide the rest of the text captions. I used the Hide and Show actions to perform this effect. 

Using Hide and Show actions

Best practice hint: Naming your objects will make it easy for you to identify the object you want to perform action on. 

My process of entering the text of the text captions is to move these captions to the outer viewport, edit the text, then align these captions to the place holder.

Text captions - one for each feature

I found that this is not the best option as it requires a bit of moving and shuffling effort every time you want to modify my slide.

Option 2 - Roll your own - Advanced Actions and variable

Knowing the short fall of my previous technique, my next attempt explored how user variables can be used to create a more customizable slide. For this technique, I use

1. a user variable named vodDescriptionValue to store the feature description.
2. a single text caption named txtDescription to display the user variable.
3. an Advanced Action on the button to assign the actual description text in vodDescriptionValue

Essentially, this process is a 2 step procedure. First you assign your user variable to the text caption. You then assign the text to your variable in the next step.

Step 1: Assigning a variable to a text caption

Step 2: Assign the description text to a user variable

One of the improvements in Captivate v8 allows you to insert line breaks (carriage returns and/or line feeds) to your text. By using "\n" in the text setting the text in the literal field, the "\n" special character will break the lines in the text. For example, the text "Portable Bookmark\n\nThis is line 1\nThis is line 2\nThis is line 3" will be rendered as follows:-

Technique to render line breaks

In addition to the fact that entering the special encoded text is NOT WYSIWYG, I found that there is an additional flaw in Captivate. Once you have saved your text in the literal field, you lost the capability to edit the existing text. I tried to export the project to an xml and modify the source but failed. The only way to update to text is to retype your text again in the literal field. 

Limitation: For an Advanced Action, you can't edit the Literal text in Assign action.

Option 3 - Roll your own - Shared Actions

I got around the limitation of the previous technique by using Shared Actions. Creating a shared action is similar to creating an advanced action with one additional step. You will be prompted to enter details on your parameters.

Step 1: Creating a Shared Action

Best practice hint: Naming your parameters as meaningful as you can will help you remember how to use your created shared action.

After you have created the shared action, you assign values to your parameters.

Step 2: Assigning values to your shared action's parameters

This technique has the advantage over the previous by allowing you to edit your saved parameters. There is a minor inconvenience though, you will need to assign all the parameter values each time you use the shared action.

Option 4 - External file

For the bold and those who want to explore advanced techniques to create your presentation, you can use an external file as your input. You specify your data from an external file (CSV, JSON or XML) and use coding (Javascript) to link your data to user variables. This is probably the most advanced and reusable technique for your project. For this exercise, I did not explore this technique as my aim to find the easiest way to customize my presentation with little or no coding. 

Lesson recap

As a summary, I have highlighted 4 techniques that are available to authors to tell their stories.

• Option 1 - Learning Interactive widget
• Option 2 - Roll your own - Simple Advanced Actions
• Option 3 - Roll your own - Shared Actions
• Option 4 - External file

Each technique has its own pros and cons and there is no right or wrong to select a particular technique. You select the technique that is most comfortable and familiar to you. 

adobe Captivate - a new trainer tool

To Adobe - Good on yer

The de facto tool of choice for trainers is PowerPoint. While I was exploring new ways to present my training, I discovered Adobe has a product for trainers. The product was formerly a flagship product from Macromedia, the creator of the ubiquitous web designing tools; Flash and Dreamweaver. After Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005, Adobe has continued to improve Captivate to make the tool even more friendly and added more features for trainers to prepare their materials. I was glad that history did not repeat itself that products after being taken over often died a slow death when the new owner did not know what to do with the product. I wondered how many remembered when IBM took over the then de facto word processor; WordPerfect. Similarly when UnderWare sold one of the most popular programmer's text editors "Brief" to Borland, Brief died a similar death. It therefore gave me a tickle of happiness that a product (in this case Captivate) can continue to grow and live its purpose. For that, "good on yer, Adobe", for doing a wonderful job to continue to grow and add useful features to Captivate.

Multiscreen

One of Captivate's features that attracted my attention is her ability to create multiscreen training materials in a WYSIWYG way without any coding. In this modern era, where users are no longer restricted to sitting behind the desk and using their PCs, users are demanding to have access to contents from their smartphones, from their tablets and of course from their laptops; access to the same content anywhere and anytime. Multiscreen enabled the content author (e.g. trainer) to create a single content and present the same content to users via their devices of choices (laptops, smartphones, tablets and in other cases, TVs). Captivate provides a very simple way to create multi-screen contents. Markers on the captivate editor (also known as breakpoints) set the 3 standard views; each view serves the layout for the dimensions for the targeted device

1. Primary view for laptops (1024 x 627)
2. Tablet view for tablets (768 x 627)
3. Mobile view for smartphones (360 x 415)

Adobe believes that these 3 standard layouts are sufficient to get target most of your audience out there. You can change these layout sizes (heights or width) but you are restricted in the total layouts available to you; you cannot add more breakpoints. 

Adobe coined the term "responsive" design to describe how Captivate allows content authors to design a single training content that will be rendered correctly to their users. My way of interpreting this jargon is that contents will be auto responsive to the devices the users used to view the contents; i.e the contents will be rendered correctly on the appropriate device. Adobe further makes it easier for the authors to pretest how their content will look on laptops, tablets and smartphones via the multi-device preview feature. You can also use the free Adobe Edge app to preview your content on a physical mobile device. Responsive design is only available in Captivate version 8. 

Parent-Child-Grandchild inheritance

The Adobe engineers adopted an inheritance design pattern to make the content author easy to create content for 3 different views. The design pattern adopts a parent-child-grandchild concept. The primary view is the parent. Whenever you change the objects in the primary view, the content in the child view and grandchild view will be automatically modified. Similarly whenever you change the objects in the tablet view (the child), the grandchild view will be automatically modified. However, when you do this operation on the child, the parent-child relationship will be broken; i.e. the objects in the parent view will not be changed. The ability to break the parent-child-grandchild relationship is a very useful feature to authors.

There is another technique to have a different look and feel between the views. You can either use the "Exclude from Other views" or you can pull the object to the outside the viewpoint from any view. Internally, using the first option will pull the object to the outside the viewpoint from the other views. There is however, a subtle difference in the output. To have an object in a specific view (either in the Parent, the Child or the Grandchild), use the first option on the specific view (see purple rectangle below). To have an object in both the Parent, Child view, use the second option on the Grandchild view (see white rectangle below). To have an object in the Child and Grandchild view (see green rectangle), it is a two step process. First, you must Exclude the object from other views on the Parent view followed by pulling the object back from the outside in the Child view. 

Blue rectangle is rendered in all views
Purple rectangle is shown only in the Parent view.
White rectangle is rendered in both Parent and Child views
Note: the Green rectangle is outside the viewpoint of the Parent view

Blue rectangle is rendered in all views
White rectangle is rendered in both Parent and Child views
Green rectangle is rendered in Child and Grandchild views

Smart positioning - How smart can you be?

One of the features that Captivate provides to authors to design your object layouts is smart positioning. Smart positioning allows you to anchor your object relative to the slide boundary. This feature reminds me of a similar functionality by Microsoft XAML editor in Microsoft C#. Compared to Microsoft C# editor, Captivate provides more options to position your objects. 

By default, any object created is anchored to the top and left boundary of your slide. Positioning is made even easier by visually dragging the smart-positioning anchor to the other boundary. Please note that the a position marker can only be re-positioned in the same direction. The top boundary marker can only be re-positioned vertically to the bottom while the right boundary marker can only be re-positioned horizontally to the left boundary marker. 

Bug Alert: There is a bug in v8.0.0.145 when you duplicate your object. The "Object Size" may be different in your grandchild view or the text changed in your primary view is not changed in your grandchild view.

For positioning, I recommend you to set your position value using the % instead of using the pixel. The layout renders correctly in the different views when you select to use the % unit. If you opt for the latter option (pixel), you must set the positions separately in all the views. Besides the % and px, you can also use the "% Relative" if you have the need to position an object relative to another object. 

Last but not least, you have at your disposal, the min-max feature of Captivate. This allows to fix your object size so that the auto-scaling feature will not distort the shape of your objects. This is illustrated by the diagram below. The objects (white rectangle and the adobe logo) on the bottom is fixed to a minimum size while the top objects (purple rectangle and the adobe logo) scaled accordingly when they are rendered on the grandchild view.

"Layout of multiple objects" made easy

Modifying the layout of multiple objects is made very simple with Captivate. Once you have selected two or more objects, you can

• align your selected objects to the top, left, bottom or right,
• size them equally
• space them horizontally or vertically

The first selected object is used as the reference for your modification. Example, if you align two or more objects to the left by selecting object_1, object_2 and object_3, all the objects will be aligned left to your first selected object (object_1).

What's Next

As my main aim is to create assessment questions during my training session, I would discuss my exploration on the Quiz capability of Captivate. This feature in combination of the navigation capability of the slides will be explored in my next segment.