Create software simulations

Start instructions with a verb, except for captions providing general knowledge or information, like defining a term. Omit anything unnecessary and break up longer chunks of text over several captions or slides. Related Content. Nicole Legault 18 Comments. Nicole Legault 10 Comments. Nicole Legault 6 Comments. Expand Thanks for the tips, Nicole.

I've found that pausing the simulation on screens where there is lots of text particularly when providing additional information beyond the core process steps being demonstrated , and allowing users to click 'Next' to move on when they are ready gives them a far greater sense of control and comfort, reducing that 'rushed' feeling some users report when working through systems simulations.

Thanks for your comments, Luke! That is a really great point and a good tip about the pacing of simulations I also don't like it when people decide on an arbitrary amount of time to let the learners read the slide before auto-advancing.. Also love your point about giving learners more control Great comment, Luke, thanks again!

Absolutely agreed! Love the reminder about closing windows before you record. It is distracting when someone has extra tabs open or blinking messages in the corner of their screen while recording. The details matter!

Thanks for the comment, Lauren! This article is very timely for me. I am going to start a software training simulation project in the coming weeks. Thank you. I hope it will be helpful for you Caesar. If you learn any other tips or tricks that I left out through your upcoming experience please don't hesitate to report back and let us know in the comments!

Always so helpful to hear from others experiences and insights. Very well done Nicole! Thank you Duane! Please fix. Thanks for the heads up Brian, it's been fixed! Very nice, I am working on my process for this right now so your post is very timely! Very Timely! Going to be working on a simulation in the near future. Expand Great article, Nicole! I've found the way to make these match most closely is to insert the video into Storyline, publish it, and grab the static shots from the published course.

This is especially helpful if someone else has done the original screen recording. Hope this helps! Those are some awesome tips, Tess! Thanks for sharing! Also in case some people don't know this, you can also manually add screenshots into your recording while you're using the Recorder by simply hitting the Printscreen key you can also adjust which key does the screenshot under the recorder settings.

Obviously not so helpful if you're working from someone else's recording, but when recording yourself can be a helpful trick to know about, especially if it's a slide you know you'll want to call out information for. The Storyline Slide area is very important. Great article Nicole.

I've recently done a series of screencasts using a program called Screencast-O-Matic. Recording my actions and narrating my steps and key points as I complete the actions has been well received by learners. It seems to work well on YouTube but I guess it depends.

I'm working on a new software simulation but just using static screenshots with pop-ups etc I've used that too, Mark. I like the way the mouse cursor has a circle around it in Screencast-O-Matic, so it's easy to spot in the recording. I too use Screen-cast-omatic. I like it in many ways. Expand I recently also discovered the value of recording the SMEs. Then, as an instructional designer, I was able to distill it into a clean product for the learner.

Hi Nicholas! Thanks for the comment -- I've been in exactly the same situation where at the end of a long meeting I don't even comprehend what the SME is saying anymore but I just keep nodding and smiling and acting like I do, knowing the recorded footage will save me later! This article was extremely helpful! I also loved the tip about pacing and using next buttons. I love creating learning that works for every learner! Great job! Happy to hear this is helpful for you Kristie!

Thanks for leaving a comment :. Expand Awesome article, Nicole. When Articulate upgraded from Storyline 1 to 2, the software almost completely lost the ability to use the Enter Key to submit text interactions. This seemingly simple task worked like a charm for the first several hundred training courses we produced, but as soon as SL2 was released, we lost this ability. That's right, if the simulation calls for the user to type in a text box and press Enter, Storyline 2 wants you to instead require the user to type in the text box and click the Submit button with their mouse.

This task will now only work if you publish to LMS. If your job application requires you to publish to Web or CD as ours did , it's just "tough luck". I've discussed this several times with Storyline support staff over the last year and a half.

They have agreed that the problem exists, and that I'm doing everything correctly; but they passed it on to the black hole that is the Articulate - Quality Assurance team about 16 months ago. Seven software builds later, and no answer is on the horizon. The temporary work-around solution is always "just use the 'submit' button". It depends on the individual slides within the simulation. Can any software be used to create these demos? Something other than PowerPoint or even a Linux software that has the screen being transferred to a windows based PC that Adobe Connect is on?

You can create a simulation for any type of software application, not just powerpoint. Just select the application or use a pre-set size or select a browser, whichever is appropriate then record and do what you do in the application to create your simulation. It works great for all of them. SInce the update to CP, recording a software simulation or a Video Demo is again made impossible on retina screens, without having to change an ini file. Why is this done, please? This is a wonderful resource that reminds me just how far Captivate has come.

Software demo and responsive projects have made creating much easier. Like Lieve I wonder what new functionality will be next. Any idea whether this workflow will be improved?

Thank you for this. For a newbie I can now record and edit a simulation by following the steps in the demo. Simulations is one of the best features of Captivate! Thank you for giving credit to Pooja! You must be logged in to post a comment. Show All Notifications.

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Internal and external users. Learner transcripts. Managing user groups. Overview of auto-generated user groups. Self-Paced trainings. Set up announcements. Set up external users. Set up gamification. Set up internal users. Types of course modules. Virtual classroom trainings. In the toolbar, click Preview and then choose Project to preview each of the projects. Demo : As the simulation progresses, the pointer moves across the screen.

The area around the clicked part of the screen is highlighted. Also, text captions display indicators as the area is clicked. The simulation without any user intervention. Training : You need to perform each screen task. In our project, the first screen task is to click File. The simulation will wait until you perform this task. If you hover the pointer over the File menu, a hint is displayed. If you click elsewhere on the screen, a failure caption tells you where you need to click.

When you click the correct location, the simulation progresses to the next step. Assessment : You need to perform each screen task. Because this is an assessment mode, you are not provided with hints if you hover the pointer over the File menu.

When you click the correct location, the preview progresses to the next step. For more information on this topic, see How to record software simulations in Adobe Captivate. In the previous section, we created software simulation projects from scratch. However, you can also insert software simulations at any point within an existing project.

Let's insert a short software simulation in Demo mode of the steps required to create a new PowerPoint presentation. In the Record Additional Slides dialog box, choose the slide after which you want to insert the software simulation and click OK. When you create a software simulation, Captivate creates a project that uses slides and objects that can be easily manipulated.

You can rearrange the slides, insert slides between the steps in a simulation, you can edit the properties of objects, and change the hints and error captions that are displayed. In a Demo project, you can even change the path of a mouse. Besides the above editing changes, you can also use Captivate's timing feature to adjust the timing on a slide. It is not mandatory that you download the project file that ships with this tutorial. You can still follow along with the steps in this procedure.

However, you will need to create a Demo software simulation project Captivate. As you step through the simulation of an application while creating a software simulation , Captivate sets the time for which a slide is displayed to the user. PowerPoint displays the available themes that you can apply to the new presentation.

Select the Atlas theme. Notice, that the preview duration is the same as in step 2 above. However, since we have changed the contents in the text caption, we need to increase the duration for which the slide is displayed to users. Let's use Captivate's Timeline panel to adjust the timeline for this slide and the object on the slide.