The Cost of Fast

“It’s back on.” Three words that announced commercials were over and you were now missing the show. Three words that turned trying to finish math homework from bothersome to a fight for one’s life.

Do I dare, I would think.

Remembering the answer key I’d discovered along with my classmates while thumbing through the brand new textbooks. Hearing the opening notes of the theme song to Boy Meets World or Family Matters helped make that decision for me. I quickly flipped to the back of the book and found answers and scribbled down the numbers without thought. Checking nothing and then slamming the book shut to join my brother and sister mere inches from the television screen.

However, stiff pages on the new textbooks tended to stick together and the forbidden answer key pages even more so since they hardly saw use. The answer key might’ve been my shortcut to a TGIFriday night. But providing all the right answers to the wrong questions was all the evidence a suspicious sixth-grade math teacher needed.

Sadly, we adults don’t have answers in the backs of our books; however, the occasional shortcut still pops its head up to offer a lifeline. And, though I don’t have Cory and Shawn to rush home to—those shortcuts are still tempting.

While devising mock-ups for my portfolio I came up with Nuts ’n’ Bolts Hardware. A client that needed a tool to inform team members on safe ladder operation. It needed to be something that would engage learners’ attention, built for someone on their feet and mid-shift. This wouldn’t be used during onboarding training or a link in an HR email.

The brief wasn’t up for negotiation, like many a request for proposal I’d gotten as a video producer. What was mine to decide was the approach. What tools I would use and how the information would be presented. I could have used the freedom of a mock client to build something that showed off every trick in the Articulate toolbox—and nothing about the brief would have stopped me. Instead, the constraints came from the same place a real client’s would: a specific problem, on a specific device, for a specific person standing at a ladder.

Because I had invented every aspect of this mock-up and client requirement, I had thumbed the scale a bit in the beginning. I had use of both Storyline and Rise to build this eLearning tool, and I had intended to build something in Rise to complement the Storyline mock-ups I was also developing for the portfolio.

It was talking through the build with Claude, my usual thinking partner for these projects, that the cracks in my Rise plan started to show. Not because I was told to switch—none of Claude’s answers to my questions about approach and my thought process said “you should use Storyline instead.” But the more I talked through how I’d execute the gating and the feedback, the more the answers kept circling the same gap. Eventually I just asked the question directly: was Rise even the right tool for this? The answer, once I’d said it out loud, was obvious.

When the effect of a learner skimming past a step is “they misunderstood something,” free navigation isn’t as costly. When the impact is “someone could get hurt,” it is. Ladder safety sits in the second category—so gating wasn’t optional, it was the whole point. Rise’s continuous-scrolling landing page delivers the information, but in a format that’s tempting to scroll straight through to the bottom and click done. And even with additional checks added to a Rise page, there’s only a way to confirm a knowledge check was completed—not whether the learner actually got it right.

That lack of correctness was tied to my second issue with Rise: there was no way to route a learner to a separate screen based on their answer. Rise’s Scenario block can branch a conversation, but it can’t send someone to a remediation slide. No secondary path to reinforce what they’d missed—just feedback in place, and the learner moves on either way.

Rise has its benefits. Its drag-and-drop, quickly assembled modules were what made me consider the tool for this project in the first place. But once I thought through what Nuts ’n’ Bolts’ ladder training needed, it became clear Storyline would have to step in and fill the gaps. Storyline let me take a learner through the information one lesson at a time, on individual slides, with actionable feedback built into every wrong answer.

The finished module is at the top of the page, ready to explore now that you’ve read what went into its design. That’s the thinking behind it. Here’s how it got built.

The module itself was imagined to first be encountered by team members through a QR code on signage located at the ladder storage locations around a Nuts ’n’ Bolts Hardware store. A team member would use a handheld smart device to scan the QR code and launch the module. It was designed for landscape delivery, so it would look and behave the same no matter which device a store may be using.

Player chrome was removed in favor of custom buttons built directly into the slides—the same design, duplicated across the module, doing the gating and branching Rise couldn’t. Answers are selected from a series of buttons, and a learner gets immediate feedback: each choice funnels to a distinct affirmation or remediation slide, built once and reused everywhere the module needed it. It gave me the modular speed of Rise—I just had to build the modules myself first.

None of this is to say Rise is the wrong tool. It’s a good one, for the right job. But if I hadn’t stopped to ask what this job truly needed, I would’ve ended up getting all the right answers to all the wrong questions.