CASA program · Production

Creating a reusable Storyline production system.

A regulator producing regulated learning at volume has a consistency problem before it has a quality problem. The answer was a documented production system: templates, specified components, a navigation convention and an asset library the whole design team built from.

Client: Civil Aviation Safety Authority
program: CASA, 2015–2021
Role: Design and production system
Built with: Articulate Storyline · Adobe CC · PowerPoint · InDesign
Users: The internal instructional design team

A specification sheet for a course component: a trophy icon shown with pixel dimensions and slide position, beside square and round treatments, above five state swatches labelled normal, hover, active, visited and disabled. — The part nobody sees. Dimensions, slide position and five states, specified once. A designer who has this does not have to invent a hover colour, and a reviewer does not have to notice that they did.

In 60 seconds

The problem: Several designers producing regulated aviation learning to different visual and interaction conventions.
My role: Designed and documented the production system, and maintained the asset libraries.
Scope: Style manual, Storyline, PowerPoint and InDesign templates, specified components with states, an icon and step-marker library, navigation conventions and multimedia treatments.
Where it got to: A production system the regulator's design team used to build courses. Editorial placeholder: Confirm governance and handover arrangements
Built with: Articulate Storyline · Adobe CC

The situation

By the time an organisation is producing enough learning to need more than one designer, it has a consistency problem. Two courses built to the same brief by two people will differ in navigation, in iconography, in how a video is presented and in what a disabled control looks like. Learners read that inconsistency as carelessness, and in a safety regulator carelessness is expensive.

The usual response is a style guide nobody opens. The alternative is a production system: the conventions are in the file you start from, so following them is easier than not.

What was actually wrong

The unit of reuse is not the template. It is the component and its states. A template that specifies layout but not behaviour still produces four different hover treatments.

So each component was specified down to dimensions, slide position and its normal, hover, active, visited and disabled states. That is unglamorous work, and it is the reason several designers could produce something that read as one program.

What it looked like, and why

The CASA course icon library: ten icons including discussion, balloon, idea, question, laptop, link, presenter, information, play and close, each in outline and inverted treatments, above numbered step markers 01 to 10 in square and round variants with grey, red and blue states. — One icon set, two treatments, and step markers carrying visited, current and remaining states. The numerals do the work colour cannot: a learner who does not perceive the red current-step marker still reads the number.Shown small on purpose. Enlarge to read it.

A blank course template menu screen showing a two-by-three grid of image cards captioned Title One to Title Six, with aviation photography placeholders and a dark footer bar. — The template as it ships to a designer, with placeholder titles intact. Showing it unfilled is the point: this is the starting file, and the grid, the caption plate and the footer are already decided before anyone writes a word.

A template guidance slide reading 'Something compelling on this slide' with a list of suggestions: statistics, video, funny, reflective question, interaction, beside a map of Australia and a row of human figures. — Authoring guidance built into the template rather than filed in a manual. The slide tells the next designer what job this position does. Note that this is a guidance artefact, not a finished screen and not learner data.

A course video lightbox: a full-width video player with a close control at the top right and four numbered step markers beneath it. — One video treatment, specified once. Video arrives in a lightbox with a visible close control and the step markers still on screen, so watching a clip never costs a learner their place in the module.Shown small on purpose. Enlarge to read it.

Key design decisions

Specify states, not just layouts
The choice
Every reusable component was documented with dimensions, position and five interaction states.
Why
Layout-only templates still produce inconsistent behaviour. States are where the drift actually happens.
Number every step marker
The choice
Progression markers carry a numeral as well as a colour state.
Why
Colour alone excludes learners who cannot distinguish the current step from the remaining ones, and it fails entirely when a course is printed or projected.
Put the guidance in the file
The choice
Authoring instructions were written onto template slides rather than into a separate manual.
Why
A manual is a thing a designer has to remember to consult. A template slide is a thing they have to delete.

Where it got to

A style manual with Storyline, PowerPoint and InDesign templates
Specified components with documented dimensions, positions and states
An icon and step-marker library in outline and inverted treatments
A single video and multimedia treatment used across courses
Editorial placeholder: Confirm governance, documentation and handover arrangements

Production volumes, time savings and team size are not published and are not claimed here.