I have built a lot of interactions in Storyline over the years. Click-to-reveal cards, drag-and-drops, branching scenarios, tabs, sliders, the whole toolkit. And somewhere along the way I learned a hard lesson that I think a lot of us learn eventually.
Adding an interaction is not the same as creating engagement.
It is easy to assume the two go together. The learner is clicking, so they must be engaged, right? But I have watched people click through elaborate interactions while their brain is completely checked out. The hand is busy. The mind is somewhere else entirely. That is not engagement. That is just activity wearing engagement’s clothes.
Let me unpack why this happens, and what actually makes an interaction work.
Clicking Is Not Thinking
Here is the core confusion. We often treat interactivity and engagement as the same thing, but they are measuring different things.
Interactivity is physical. It is whether the learner is doing something with the mouse. Engagement is mental. It is whether the learner is actually thinking, deciding, or wrestling with something.
You can have one without the other. A beautiful click-to-reveal where each card just shows another paragraph of text is interactive, but it asks nothing of the learner’s mind. They click, they skim, they move on. All we did was hide the content behind a button and call it interactive. The learner is no more engaged than if they had scrolled a page.
The Interactions That Fall Flat
Over time I started noticing a pattern in the interactions that looked busy but did nothing. A few of the usual suspects:
- Click-to-reveal with no reason to care. The content behind each tab is just more information. There is no question driving the clicks, so revealing it is a chore, not a discovery.
- Drag-and-drop that is really just sorting the obvious. If the right answer is clear before the learner even starts, the dragging is busywork. Their mind was never engaged, only their hand.
- Fake choices. A branching moment where every path leads to the same place, or where the “wrong” option is so obviously wrong that there was never a real decision to make.
- Decoration dressed as interaction. Animations and hover effects that look dynamic but ask nothing of the learner. Motion is not the same as meaning.
None of these are bad because of the mechanic. Click-to-reveal and drag-and-drop are fine tools. They fall flat because of how they were used, which is the part that actually matters.
What Real Engagement Needs
So what separates an interaction that works from one that just moves? In my experience, it comes down to a few things.
The interaction has to make the learner think, not just act. There needs to be a genuine question in their mind at the moment they click, drag, or choose. If they already know the answer, or if there is no answer to find, the interaction is hollow.
It helps to tie back to three ideas worth keeping in mind:
- A real decision. The learner should have to weigh something. The best interactions put them in a situation where the right move is not obvious, so their mind has to do work.
- A meaningful consequence. When a choice leads somewhere different, the learner has a reason to care about getting it right. Consequence is what turns a click into a decision.
- A connection to the real job. If the interaction mirrors a situation the learner actually faces, their brain treats it as relevant and switches on. Abstract exercises get abstract attention.
When those are present, the mechanic almost does not matter. A plain multiple-choice question inside a realistic scenario can out-engage the fanciest drag-and-drop, because the thinking is real.
Design the Thinking First, the Mechanic Second
This is the shift that changed how I build. I used to start by picking an interaction type. “This section should have a drag-and-drop.” Then I would reverse-engineer content to fill it. That is backwards, and it is how you end up with interactions that look good and do nothing.
Now I start with the thinking. What do I want happening inside the learner’s head at this moment? What decision should they face, what should they have to figure out? Once I know the mental work I am trying to create, the right mechanic usually becomes obvious. Sometimes it is a scenario. Sometimes it is a simple question. Sometimes the best choice is no interaction at all, just a clear moment of explanation.
The interaction type is the last decision, not the first. It serves the thinking. When it is chosen the other way around, it tends to serve nothing but the appearance of effort.
Busy Is Not the Goal
Storyline is a powerful tool, and its interactions are genuinely useful. But the tool will happily let you build something that looks engaging and is not. It cannot tell the difference between a click that means something and a click that does not. Only the designer can.
So the next time you reach for an interaction, pause and ask the honest question. What is this actually making the learner think about? If you have a good answer, build it. If the honest answer is “nothing, it just adds some clicking,” that is the moment to rethink, because a slide full of movement and empty of thought is not better than a plain one. It is just busier.
Engagement was never about the mouse. It was always about the mind.
If you want interactions that actually make learners think, built on real decisions instead of empty clicks, that is exactly the kind of work I love to do. You can always reach out for help with your next custom eLearning project.
