When you add buttons, click boxes, text entry boxes or slidelets to a slide, you can select several options from the On Success area including: Continue, Go to previous slide, Go to next slide, Jump to slide, Open URL or file; Open other project, Send e-mail to, Execute JavaScript and No Action.
Most users who insert an interactive object on a slide elect to use Continue. Why? Because Continue is the default action in the menu and many new developers simply don’t realize what the other options do or how they might be different.
I would recommend that you select one of the jump options instead of Continue, with Go to next slide being the one you are most likely to use in a standard project (without branching).
As a general production rule, I try to keep the number of objects on any slide to a bare minimum. For instance, in my simulations I only use one caption per slide, teamed with a single button or click box that holds the action until the user is finished reading the caption (the button normally says something clever like "Continue"). If more captions are needed to describe what’s happening on a given slide, I’ll duplicate the slide as many times as needed. While I’m not advocating that you create a project with hundreds of slides, a project that contains a more slides, each with fewer objects, actually streams better over the Internet than projects with fewer slides, but multiple objects per slide.
Using a minimalist approach to production (where I insert as few objects per slide as possible), I actually save production time. How? If I only have one caption on a slide, and a button or click box that uses a Go to next slide action instead of Continue, the result of a user click will bounce the user instantly to the next slide, regardless of how much "dead air" remained on the Timeline when I published the project. However, if the interactive object used the Continue action, the "dead air" would play after the user clicks the button. And that’s a maddening problem for you as a developer, where even a few seconds of "dead air" can throw off your project.
If you use a Go To action, you will no longer have to concern yourself with a sloppy Timeline (a Timeline with lots of "dead air"). If you’ve been properly trained to use Captivate, you were probably taught to keep the Timeline as clean as possible. That’s good advice. But you’ll no longer have to worry about "dead air" because the "Go To" action will basically ignore anything on the Timeline once the user clicks the button. The trick will be to fight your instincts and leave the "dead air" on the Timeline. It’s okay. The "dead air" will no longer hurt anything.
The picture below shows what I’d consider to be a sloppy Timeline. If your user were to click on the Click Box shown below, and the action was set to Continue, you’d be looking at more than two seconds of "dead air" before the end of the slide was reached and the next slide appeared.
To prevent the "dead air" problem and still use a Continue action, you’d have to make your Timeline look like the picture below.
Look, I’m not saying that the Timeline above isn’t pretty when compared to Mr. Sloppy just above it. It’s a real looker! However, if you spent time making the Timeline on all of your slides look like the picture above, I’m betting you added a significant amount of time to your work load. Give yourself a break… use the "Go to" actions instead of Continue. And as tempting as it is to make your Timelines pretty, go ahead and embrace the ugly… as shown in the first example above.
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