Creating custom question feedback

- If you've followed along with this course or have used Captivate to build a quiz, no doubt you're familiar with the feedback captions that Captivate provides you by default. For instance, I'm gonna go to this multiple choice question, and we can see here that we have a failure caption, a success caption and an incomplete caption. In this lesson, we'll go through several different ways that you can customize the feedback that your user sees. So to begin, if you don't like the wording of the captions that appear, maybe it's just something as simple as that, it's easy to change just by simply double clicking on a caption and then just modifying the text to your liking.

Now, you do also have the option of going to the Quiz menu and then Quiz Preferences. From here, find the Default Labels area. Here is where you can change the text that appears in those feedback captions. So for instance, I'm gonna change my failure caption to simply say, "Incorrect - Click anywhere to continue." So I'm gonna take out that part about pressing Y. I'll click OK. Now, the only caveat with changing those captions messages is that your changes are not applied to quiz questions that already exist in your project.

Here, you can see that my failure caption still has the part about pressing Y. However, if I quickly add a new quiz question to my project, so I'll add a new multiple choice slide. You can see that here's my captions, and I'll separate them, and now my failure caption has that updated text. For the old questions, I'd have to go through each one, one by one, and change the captions individually. The lesson is, if you wanna change the default labels that appear in your captions, it's best to do that before you add quiz questions to a Captivate project.

I'm just gonna delete this dummy slide that I put in. We don't need that. Let's move on. For this multiple choice question on slide 18, the correct answer is D, all of the above. So we're gonna use a feature that exists, but only for multiple choice questions. Also, it has to be a multiple choice question that has only one correct answer, like this one. You can also have multiple choice questions have multiple correct answers, like pick two out of three.

What we're gonna do is only for multiple choice that have one correct answer. Right now we've got a success caption and a failure caption for this question, and the incomplete caption. Looking in the Quiz panel, you can see that the user is allowed only 1 attempt. The Success is set to Continue and the drop-down under Last Attempt is also set to Continue. So if you preview the project from this slide, if I pick any of the wrong answers, you get the failure caption, it's the same failure caption, and then you go on to the next question.

Of course, if you answer correctly, you get the correct answer. I'm gonna change this so that we get a customized feedback caption for each answer that's incorrect. Basically, we'll see a different failure caption, depending on which incorrect answer has been chosen. How we're gonna do this is just select on the first incorrect answer, and then over here in the Properties, not in the Quiz area, but in the Properties, I'm gonna find the Options area. There's Style and Options, so we're here at Options.

I'm going to check this Advanced Answer Option check box. Then I'm also gonna select Show Feedback Message. When I do that, you see that we get this little special feedback message here that we can customize, and it's attached just to this answer. It's kinda hard to see. I'm gonna change the Style of this from Default Caption Style to Default Failure Caption Style. I will take a minute to type in some special feedback. That looks good.

Now I'm gonna so the same thing for Hepatitis, which is also an incorrect answer. So Properties, Options, here's Advanced Answer Option. I'm going to Show the Feedback Message. Here it is. I'm going to change the Style to Default Failure Caption Style, and I will type in my feedback. Finally, I'll do it for this last incorrect answer. Advanced Answer Options, Show Feedback Message. Let's Preview the project From this Slide and see how it works.

I'll try Hepatitis and I'll click Submit. You can see that we get the feedback that is specific to that particular answer. Now I click and I go on. We could build on what we did here a little bit. Instead of allowing only one attempt, here in the Quiz panel I'll allow Infinite Attempts, so this way the user can try over and over. Each time they get an incorrect answer, they'll get the corresponding caption. If we test this just the way that it is now, I'm gonna Preview From this Slide, it's not going to work.

So if I click Hepatitis, I get the feedback caption, but then when I click, we end up going onto the next slide. We wanna have Infinite Attempts. What you actually have to do is click on each one of those individual answers again, and in the Properties, change the action from Continue to No Action. You can control the action of the slide not only from the slide level, but from these individual answer levels. I'm gonna go through all three of those and change those to No Action and No Action, and for FVRCP, which is the correct answer, Continue is grayed out, and that's completely fine.

So now let's Preview the project From this Slide. I'll answer incorrectly, I'll get the special feedback for that answer. I'll answer incorrectly again, there's our special feedback. I'll answer incorrectly again, there's our special feedback. I could go on and on and on like that. Of course, when I do answer the correct choice, we go onto the next slide. So stand up and now do a couple little jumping jacks and kinda shake it off because now we're gonna look at another way to provide your user customized failure messages.

It's similar to this, but actually not really, it's different. We're just gonna go to another multiple choice question to try this out. We're gonna go to slide 23. This technique, again, is gonna work only for multiple choice questions. However, it can work for multiple choice questions that have one correct answer or with more than one correct answer, like this question. Right here we've got Fleas and Allergies are both the correct answer.

Starting out here, On Success for our quiz question here, is set to Continue. And it's the same for Last Attempt, set to Continue. We have 1 attempt to answer this correctly. Just to see how this works from the get-go, we're gonna Preview the project From this Slide. If I answer incorrectly, I get my single feedback. I click to continue, and we go onto the next question. The approach that we're gonna use is to set different failure captions for up to three successive attempts.

So here's what that looks like. Over in the Quiz area, we're gonna change No. of Attempts from 1 to 3. Now, in this drop-down, under Failure Messages, we're gonna select 3, to match the number of attempts. What this actually does is give us three separate failure captions to work with. You can't tell right away, but if I drag and drop these separately, you can see that there are, indeed, three. So the user has three tries to answer correctly, and they'll see a different failure caption each successive time that they fail.

How do you know which one is which? If you mouse over the failure captions, you get a little tool tip, Incorrect Caption 1, Incorrect Caption 2 and Incorrect Caption 3. I'm gonna take a minute to just customize the actual text that's in each one of these. This is the failure caption that they'll see the first time they get it wrong. Here's the failure caption the second time they get it wrong. And here is the caption for the third time they get it wrong.

Let's go ahead and Preview From this Slide and see how it works. I will answer incorrectly. I've got the wrong number of answers or I've picked two answers and they're the wrong ones. All right, I'll try two different answers, and this is wrong again. Here's a hint, one of the answers is allergies. Okay, I'll click to continue. So I'm gonna choose Allergies and Heartworm. I'm wrong again. The answers are Fleas and Allergies. No points for you, too bad. We click to continue and go onto the next slide.

This can be a cool way to set up your question and really kinda help your user along with some good feedback along the way. The only limitation is that if you look here in the Quiz panel for this question, the number of Failure Messages is always going to be capped at 3. If I change the No. of Attempts to 4 or 5 or 6 or even Infinite. I'll just change it to something wacky like 7. I'll drop down this Failure Messages and you'll see that 3 is still the maximum number that we're allowed.

So that's a limitation built within Captivate, and that is the only limitation for this technique. Finally, here's one other idea about how to give your user some feedback. This approach is gonna rely less on feedback captions. I'm gonna go to slide 19. This is a True/False question. It says, "Dogs need a DHPP vaccine once in their first year" of life. The correct answer is False. It's because they actually need that vaccine four times in their first year.

We're gonna set up a feedback that's not reliant on captions at all. What I'm going to do is insert a blank slide after this question. I'm gonna right click and say Slides, New Slide from and I'll choose Logos. Blank would work, too, but Logos is fine. That way we get our nice little logo and our picture of the stethoscope here. So now I wanna give the user some feedback about why they might have answered incorrectly. I'm just gonna jump actually back here to slide four that has some information about dog vaccines, and I'm gonna copy those images, I'm gonna steal them and I'm going to paste them here on our new slide.

I'm just gonna insert a text caption. See if I can grab it, there we go. I'm gonna change the text. I'm gonna make this say, "Dogs need a DHPP vaccine 4 times in their first year." And I'm going to also add in a shape that's gonna act as a button. I'm just gonna draw my shape right here and I'll double click on it and say, "Continue." Over in my Properties, I'll say Use this as a Button.

The action for this should be Go to next slide. Okay, so here's our little feedback slide that we're going to give the user if they answer incorrectly. The only thing that we have to do to make sure that the user sees this is make sure our On Success and Last Attempts are set up correctly. On Success, if the user gets this answer correct, I want them to jump over the feedback slide and go to slide 21. So I'm gonna say Jump to slide 21.

If they get this answer incorrect, go ahead and Continue, and they'll see the feedback slide and then can then go onto the next question. We'll test it out. I'll Preview From this Slide. If I answer correctly, we just go on to the next question. That's great. I'll Preview again. If I answer incorrectly, I'm told, "Sorry that was incorrect," and then we go to the next slide and it gives us some more explanatory information.

Then we go onto the next quiz question. So that's another nice option for providing your user some specific feedback as they go through a quiz. What we just built is kind of similar to a Captivate feature called remediation. With remediation, if a user's answered a question incorrectly, they're sent back to the slide that covers the information. So in our example here, if they had answered this incorrectly, the user would actually be taken all the way back in the presentation to slide five that talks about dog vaccines.

And after they've had a chance to view that, then they're taken back to the quiz question. That's a different thing than what we just set up here. If that sounds interesting to you, setting up remediation is covered in a different lesson in this course, so you can check that out. That's all the examples that we're gonna look at right now. Of course, there are other ways that you can customize your feedback. Here's a couple ideas. You could use BMP image files to create captions with a custom graphical look and feel instead of them being, essentially, Captivate text boxes.

You could also use Advanced Actions. For instance, instead of just having feedback captions, you could use Advanced Actions to have an image come up instead, with your own custom Continue button. Or here's another idea. This article on Lily Biri's well-known blog talks about adding a button to question slides. This button, users could press it to maybe get a hint before they answer their question. This article was written for Captivate 6, as you can see from the title, but it's still relevant.

If you've never used Advanced Actions, we do practice them a little elsewhere in this course, but for now, you've seen several different ways that you can customize question feedback for your users using just what's built into Captivate by default.