This week’s E-Learning Heroes Challenge is Creating Digital Magazines.
A digital magazine is, quite simply, a magazine that is published on the Internet. They are designed to look and feel like a traditional print publication, with added features such as multimedia and interactive elements.
Digital magazines share many features with e-learning but are often more intuitive to use, with cleaner layouts that don’t rely on intrusive ‘click next’ buttons.
For this reason, pivoting from e-learning courses to digital magazines can be tricky for novice designers. There is a fine line between creating a ‘glossy magazine feel’ and ensuring your design remains easy and obvious to navigate.
Place a book or a magazine in a person’s hands and they will immediately know how to use it. Does this mean the same person will know how to use a digital magazine? Or do we need to add other prompts or hints?
Central to the experience of reading a book or magazine is the act of turning the pages. Using a ‘page curl’ effect in online settings tells your users that your content it can be navigated like a printed document. “It’s just a shame there isn’t a ‘page curl’ transition in Storyline,” you’re probably thinking.
Hold that thought!This week's @ELHChallenge is 𝗖𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗗𝗶𝗴𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗠𝗮𝗴𝗮𝘇𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀. Here's my page turner, which is a follow up to Challenge 258. Things will never be the Seine again for Atsumi in Romantic Storyline, Issue 336. pic.twitter.com/euWLP7vhT1
— ᴊ ᴏ ɴ ᴀ ᴛ ʜ ᴀ ɴ_ʜ ɪ ʟ ʟ (@DevByPowerPoint) July 26, 2021
DevByPowerPoint
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: PowerPoint is the secret weapon in the e-learning designer’s arsenal. It’s great for mock-ups and creating your own simple assets.
When I needed to create a custom thumb for a slider interaction, I turned to PowerPoint. It was a simple matter to build a cartoon version of the iconic Eiffel Tower elevator using nothing more than shapes and lines, grouped and exported as a PNG image.
But the real magic can be found in the wide variety of slide transitions in PowerPoint. The ‘page curl’ effect is just one of 48 transitions included in the latest version.
The Articulate Presenter plug-in for PowerPoint expands its capabilities even further. Now you can import characters from the Content Library too!
It’s then a cinch to create a layout using your favourite character (… it’s Atsumi, by the way…) and to apply a transition effect not currently available in Storyline. This is one of the many reasons why my Twitter handle is @DevByPowerPoint. It’s so easy it feels like cheating.
Making movies
Once you’re happy with your layout and the ‘page curl’ effect, you can save the transition as a video file using the Export menu.
Post-production
The next step was to combine my video transitions with my content in Storyline. For the most part, each ‘page’ of my demo is actually a paused or completed video with text boxes and other objects placed on top.
An added benefit of this approach is that I could also make certain elements appear to rise from or fade into the page with each turn. Keeping the content separate from the animated backgrounds was useful for editing purposes too, as any mistakes or typos in the videos would be time-consuming to rectify.
The only snag was that I could not manually change the video compression settings in Storyline at first, as PowerPoint produces videos in an incompatible profile. To rectify this I used Camtasia to create copies of each video in ‘high’ profile MP4. This ensured my videos remained sharp when published, essential for that ‘glossy magazine look’.
Be Kind Rewind
Creating the appearance of the magazine closing required a bit of lateral thinking.
It wasn’t possible to achieve this effect in PowerPoint, as the ‘page curl’ transition favours the preceeding slide. Re-ordering the slides also did not produce the desired effect. Then it occurred to me – I simply had to reverse the video!
This is the original video
This is the same video, reversed
To reverse a video, you can use software such as Adobe Premiere Pro or a free online service such as EZgif.
Bookmarks
Think about the last time you read a book. Did you pay much attention to how you ‘operated’ it? Did you turn each page from the top or the bottom? Chances are you probably don’t remember. It’s this type of intuitive use that digital magazines seek to mimic and exploit.
There is no right answer to this, but I tend to favour placing ‘next buttons’ in the bottom right corner of a layout, in keeping with the Gutenberg Diagram. This is the ‘terminal area’, where the user’s gaze will come to rest and spend the most time. Yet I realise as I write this that I tend to turn the pages of the book or magazine from the top right corner.
Whichever way you hold a magazine in real life, most users will expect to interact with the right hand edge of each page to move forward in a digital magazine.
Nonetheless, some users may still need a bit of guidance and there are many ways to do this without ruining your ‘glossy magazine feel’.
In Romantic Storyline, I used a prompt located in the bottom right corner to show the user how to turn the page.
Built using shapes within Storyline, this prompt is activated when a mouse hovers over it or after 4 seconds elapse on each slide. It appears as if the corner of the page is lifting to reveal part of the next page and includes an arrow for good measure. Pointing right, this suggests forward movement in languages that read left to right.
Author's notes
This was a fun demo to put together and I enjoyed revisiting the scenario I last used in Challenge 258. Like many of David Anderson’s best challenges, this posed more questions than it answered.
Placing custom navigation buttons on your slides rather than relying on the player’s default menu is difficult. Get it right and you can create a seamless experience, tailored to your topic. Get it wrong and you risk annoying your users and distracting them from the topic.
Books and magazines remain popular because they’re easy to use, portable and provide a tactile experience. People even love the smell of printed media. You can skip forward to discover the butler did it or go back to check how you missed the clues. You can add a bookmark or fold the corner of the page and write your own notes in the margins.
Given more time I would have added some of these options to my demo. This is definitely an area of interactive design that I would like to explore further.
As always, if you have any questions or feedback about this demo please get in touch or use the comments section below.
When I first stumbled across your submission for the learning challenge, I (along with many others) was immediately was drawn to the page-turning effect in Storyline! Especially considering it is not an option. I tried to do it myself by importing a PowerPoint deck to no avail. This write-up was succinct, well written, and overall EXCELLENT to walking someone through this process! Thanks Jonathan!
Thanks Matthew! Glad to be of help. Would love to see what you come up with using this method.