Overlapping audio in click-and-reveals

Click-and-reveal activities are a useful, easy, and common interaction to add engagement to your elearning content. Storyline uses a layer system that allows you to add content that can be triggered by clicking on things, but that sometimes becomes an issue depending on how you want your elearning to be displayed when a click-and-reveal has several clickables and each item has its own audio.

Generally, an elearning slide has a base layer, followed by other content layers. When a learner clicks on an item in the base layer, a content layer is displayed. Any or all of these layers may contain audio, which might play simultaneously if the learner clicks on a new item before the previous audio has completed, or if the buttons on the base layer are still accessible. Here are a couple of solutions.

1. Editing the layer properties

Clicking on the gear in the bottom left corner brings up a different pop-up menu depending on if you are in the base layer or a slide layer.

You can choose to Hide other slide layers when the current layer is displayed, which is the best option for preventing audio from other layers from interfering with the current layer audio. You can also turn on the option to Pause timeline of base layer to prevent the layer audio from playing on top of the slide audio as well.

2. Blocking the clickable items

If it’s important that your learner listens to all of the layer audio before clicking on another item, you could instead cover the clickable objects with a transparent object or an unassigned hotspot that disappears after the audio has finished playing on a layer. This way you can still have the click-and-reveal topics displayed while not allowing your learner to skip to another topic before the layer content is complete.