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Introducing Adobe Captivate 2: Changing the way you author interactive content

In the past, interactive content authoring typically required either a large budget to outsource development or authors like you and me to learn Adobe Flash and code ActionScript. Not anymore. With the release of Adobe Captivate 2, we are empowering anyone to create engaging content. Regardless of your technical background, you can create branched soft-skills training—just like the "choose your own adventure" stories.

When we launched the new and renamed Macromedia Captivate (formerly RoboDemo) at the end of 2004, it quickly became the market leader for creating demonstrations and interactive simulations in Flash format—without content creators needing to learnFlash. Features such as timeline, audio editing, and Adobe Acrobat Professional (formerly Macromedia Breeze) and Flash integration provided more power and flexibility for authors to create and deploy robust software training. But software training alone is not sufficient to become a great sales or customer service representative. In these jobs, the worker needs a social skill set to close deals more quickly, upsell other products, or improve customer service experiences.

The release of Adobe Captivate 2, now available, revolutionizes how you can engage with your audiences and integrate the soft-skills aspect into your training. In addition to software training, you can now easily create scenario-based training—a task that does not require programming or scripting skills anymore. Use the following links to try or buy Adobe Captivate 2.

Adobe Captivate 2

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Using Adobe Captivate, you can easily develop role-play or situational scenarios that lead your audiences down different paths based on their choices. In addition to providing the correct option, the scenarios provide the typical mistakes—with different answers, each of which could all lead to different endings. Each scenario includes feedback along the way.

With one integrated system, you can rapidly develop effective and engaging training that covers the basic software as well as soft-skills training needs. This is a brief introduction to some of the new features that make rapid, scenario-based content development possible.

Branching and interactions

Adobe Captivate 2 takes the complexity out of developing scenario-based training. First of all, you can start with a basic wizard that generates placeholder slides for you. The scenarios are single-choice question slides where you can specify the action for each answer option. Or you can use blank slides with captions and click boxes, as shown in the following soft-skills example created by Troy Broas, an active member in the Adobe Captivate community:

Adobe Captivate simulation: An example of using Adobe Captivate to train soft skills

Note: This simulation is interactive. You will be queued to perform the steps for the simulation to continue once you start it.

Once you start to work on the interactions, switch to the powerful branching view, which visually displays all the learner paths. You can see the most desirable and least desirable paths as well as the dead ends, and you can make changes to all displayed interactions directly in this view.

Adobe Captivate 2 provides the option for automatic slide branching, which is useful for learner paths that seamlessly merge back into a main path based on an earlier selection.

To improve the workflow and provide further project overview options, we added an Interaction dialog box, which allows you to view and manage all project interactions in a simple table view.

Read more about developing this type of content in the article, Scenario-based learning in Adobe Captivate 2.

Engaging content with the Library

Scenario-based training is based on content other than screen recording. A role-play scenario, for example, relies heavily on images, audio, and video. For this reason, we have added a Library. This concept is familiar to users of Dreamweaver and Flash.

The Library helps you find and reuse objects easily. You can import libraries from other projects, update files inside the library with a mouse click, and launch and edit images or audio files in your favorite image editor—directly from within the Library. Find out more about this new feature in the article, Using the Library in Adobe Captivate 2.

To make your content more engaging, insert videos in Flash video (FLV) format. Just imagine having a trainer walk around inside your software simulation and point to the OK button. Or imagine using video with soft-skills training so you can train your audience to recognize and respond to body language. You can use the grayed-out option (fill outer area of a highlight box) or the new zoom functionality to focus attention on a certain area of the screen.

You don't need Flash authoring skills to add these great effects now. Watch the following software demonstration to learn how to use the library:

Adobe Captivate demonstration: Inserting Flash objects into PDF documents

Note: This is not an interactive demonstration; it includes zoom, grayed-out effects, and Flash video. This demonstration shows how easy it is for you to insert SWF files into an Adobe PDF file using Adobe Acrobat 7.

New customization options

In addition to the improved authoring workflows, Adobe Captivate 2 offers customizable skins and menus. You can link the drop-down menus to multiple demonstrations and simulations for a single, longer, seamless training experience. Or you can use it to create a table of contents or list of additional resources and links for your project.

You can adapt the playback controls to your needs. Position the controls as part of the skin without overlapping crucial content areas of the training piece itself. Using the new color picker, you can customize the colors of the skin and playback controls to meet your corporate standards and create a professional appearance. You can also add closed-captioning—a new supported accessibility option—which a user can turn off and on from the controls.

Additional customization features include results slide editing, advanced word output control, as well as modifying the user interface by dragging the individual panes.

Where to go from here

Take a look at Adobe Captivate 2 to learn more about the new features, see examples of what you can do with the new version, and download a trial version. Check out the Adobe Captivate Developer Center, which contains tutorials to get you started using new functionality in Adobe Captivate 2. Also, see the Adobe Captivate Exchange to download and share Adobe Captivate templates, playback controls, media, caption types, autotext, and games with other Adobe Captivate developers in the Adobe Captivate community.

And don't forget: Have fun with Adobe Captivate!

Meet the Adobe Captivate development team (Created with Adobe Captivate 2)

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