Slide Layer Properties – Visibility Property for Better Interactions

Audio Transcription

In this session, I’ll explain “Visibility” slide layer property for better interactions. I’ll also give some tips to work with multiple layers to save development time as well.

Hello and welcome back to the third section of Articulate Storyline training series.

In the previous video, we have seen, “How to add, duplicate and, delete slide layers”. In this video, we will see how each layer properties can be used to create better interactions.

As we have seen in the last video, we can access the slide properties either by selecting a layer and then clicking on this settings icon or by right-clicking on the layer and selecting properties.

The slide properties are classified into 3 sections – visibility, base layer, and Revisits. Let’s check out “Visibility” properties.

If we look at this interaction, we have 4 tabs and each tab displays content when clicked. Before we start adjusting the layer properties of this interaction, let us understand how this interaction works under the hood.

In the base layer, I have placed 4 rectangles and then I added a trigger to show a particular layer when clicked. If we look at Rectangle 2, it is attached with a trigger to show layer Trial Close on click. We will learn more about these triggers later in this video.

Currently, when I click a tab, it stays open for the rest of the interaction, even after I clicked the next tab. Instead, I want each tab to close once another tab is opened. So, let’s go back to the slide and make some adjustments to the layer properties. Here in the slide layer properties and we can enable the option “Hide other slide layers”.

This will automatically hide all the other visible layers in the slide except the base layer. Let me enable this property for the other layers as well. When applying a common property to multiple layers, follow this method to save time. You can simply hold control or shift key to select multiple layers and then open the layer properties to make changes. This method will apply the changes to all the selected layers in one go.

Okay now, let’s quickly preview and check if the interaction works as expected. So as you can see, whenever I click on a tab, other slide layers disappear automatically. But the objects from the base layer will remain visible on the screen. This is because we enabled the option “Hide other slide layers” which will hide the slide layers without affecting the objects in the base layer.

Now for some interactions, you might want to hide the objects in the base layer as well. For instance, in this interaction, when a learner opens this layer by clicking on “know more” button, I want to hide the objects on the base layer too.

In this case, let’s go back to slide layer properties and enable the option “Hide Objects on base layer”.

Let’s preview again. So as we can see, when I click the “know more” button, this layer shows up, and the objects from the base layer disappears. And when I close this layer and return to the base layer, objects on the base layer appears automatically.

Next…, we have the property “Hide slide layer when the timeline finishes”. As we have learned in the previous video, every slide layer has its own timeline. We can change the duration of a layer and, make objects of that layer to appear at a specific interval using this layer timeline.

So in some interactions, we might want a layer to disappear automatically after a specific time. For example, let’s go back to our previous interaction and this time, I want each tab to close automatically after 2 seconds. To do so, I can go to each layer and set the duration to 2 seconds. Then select all the layers and enable the option “Hide slide layer when timeline finished”.

Let’s preview again. This time if I open a tab, it should disappear automatically after 2 seconds. So that’s how you can use this property in your interactions.

Next we have “Allow seeking” property. This property is related to the seek bar of the course wherein we can control the playback of the slide. In some cases, we might want this playback functionality inside the layers as well which we can implement using the property “Allow seeking”.

By default, it is set to “automatically decide” but you can obviously change it by selecting yes or no options from this drop-down menu based on the requirement. If you select “Yes” then the playback functionality gets activated inside the slide layers and if you select “No” then the playback functionality will stay disabled but the seek bar will still be visible.

What happens if we leave it to automatically decide? Then storyline will allow seeking if you have enabled any of these options:

• “Hide objects on base layer” or
• “Prevent the user from clicking on the base layer” or
• “Pause timeline of base layer”
• We will learn more about these three properties in the next video.