Interactive Screenshots in Articulate Storyline

If you’re trying to teach your learners about software, products, or applications, a great way to highlight features and functionality is to use interactive screenshots.

With interactive screenshots, you orient learners with a big-picture view of an application’s interface, then let them drill down into the details for a particular menu or panel. They’re easy to build, super versatile, and a solid alternative to screencasts or simulations.

To build an interactive screenshot, you follow three simple steps:

• Create a screenshot of your product or application
• Add buttons or markers to indicate clickable regions
• Create detailed views of each region

Let’s look at how to put one together in Articulate Storyline.

• Preview the final example
• Download the project file from the community

Begin with the screenshot

Starting out in Slide View, the first thing to do is to snag a screenshot and bring it into Storyline. How you capture the screen is up to you, but since our goal is to work efficiently, we can take advantage of Storyline’s built-in screencapture tool.

In most cases, your screenshot may be larger than your slide size. It’s okay to resize the start slide’s screenshot since it’s the big-picture overview.

View this screencast on YouTube

Create the detailed views for each screen

With the original screenshot resized and set on our base layer, we can now add the detailed views for each area of emphasis. To get the best screenshot possible, we’ll want to use the original, 100% view for each detailed view.

How you present your screenshot is up to you. Storyline’s built-in picture effects give you a lot of options for customizing your images.

Using Storyline’s crop tool, you can remove all areas of the screenshot other than the area you want to emphasize. Create slide layers for each of the detailed views you want to show your learners.

View this screencast on YouTube

Add the interactive elements

Using buttons, markers, hotspots, or custom button graphics, we can indicate which areas of our screenshot learners can explore.

Simply add a button for each detailed view you created on your slide layers. Then add a trigger for each button that shows the appropriate layer.

View this screencast on YouTube

Going forward

What types of technical or product training are you designing? Where could interactive screenshots work in place of static screenshots or software simulations? Post a thread in E-Learning Heroes and tell us how you’re using interactive screenshots. We love to see the awesome Articulate Community’s work in action!