It’s Easy to Customize Your Player Design with Articulate Engage ’13

If you’ve played around with Articulate Engage ’13, you’ve probably seen one of its coolest new features: the new player (new to Engage ’13, that is!). This simple, clean, and modern-looking player was so popular in Storyline that we added it to the new Engage ’13. And it has an awesome feature that lets you customize its look in your e-learning courses.

The player is the “shell” of your e-learning course, or the “container” that holds your slides or content. The player typically contains your navigation buttons and your volume control.

When it comes to customizing your player, the sky’s the limit in Engage ’13. Seriously, you can customize it nearly any way you want. I’ll highlight a few ways in this article, but those are just the tip of the iceberg, I’m sure. You should feel free to share links back to your work showing custom players in the Comments section below.

Create a custom look and feel

Nearly everything on the player is customizable, from the color of the player to the color of the buttons (including the hover and down states) and navigation items, the text on the buttons, and the font style. All of these options give you tons of flexibility to create thousands of different looks.

Does your organization have strict branding guidelines? If so, you can follow your organization’s branding and use the colors and fonts on your player that best represent your organization.

Customize the navigation

The awesome thing about the new Engage ’13 Player is that it allows you to customize exactly what appears in the player. You can choose to include a title, a seekbar, the volume control, and the “Prev” and “Next” buttons.

What if you want to remove the volume control since your course doesn’t have audio? No problem; you can do that with one click. How about getting rid of the “Prev” and “Next” buttons, so your learners have to click through the items on screen? That’s fast and easy too.

You can easily remove items from or add navigation to your player as needed. It’s totally up to you to decide which elements of the player you want to incorporate into your course design.

Easily share Player designs

Once you’ve designed an awesome player that has exactly the right colors, functionality, and fonts, you might want to share it with others in your organization, to make sure everyone’s materials have a streamlined look and feel.

It’s easy to save your player designs in Engage ’13, as well as import and export them. Simply click the Export option in the drop-down menu to export your player. Choose where you would like to save the file, and it will be saved as an .xml file. Then, when you share this file with colleagues, they just use the import feature to bring in the .xml file that will apply your player design to their course. Easy peasy!

Those are just three of the really awesome things you can do with the new Engage ’13 player. If you have any examples of your own custom players, we’d love to see your creations. And remember, there’s always more tips and techniques available when you follow us on Twitter!