🎓 Lesson 13: Triggers — The Engine: Actions, Events & Conditions

🧩 The Anatomy of a Trigger

Every trigger in Storyline — from the simplest to the most elaborate — is built from the same three parts. Learn this sentence pattern and you've learned triggers:

• Action — what to do. Jump to a slide, show a layer, change a state, play a sound. This is the verb.
• Event — the "when" that fires it. The user clicks, the timeline starts, a state changes. Without an event, nothing ever kicks the action off.
• Condition — an optional gatekeeper. "…but only if the score is passing" or "…only if all four tabs were visited." Conditions let a trigger fire selectively. Many triggers need none.

🪄 The Trigger Wizard & Panel

You build triggers in the Triggers panel (usually on the right of the slide editor). Click the + to add one, and the Trigger Wizard opens — a small dialog with drop-down menus that walk you through the sentence: pick the Action, pick the object or slide it acts on, pick the Event, and optionally add a Condition. You assemble the whole trigger by choosing from lists; Storyline only offers you choices that make sense.

Finished triggers appear as readable sentences stacked in the panel. Here's a Triggers panel with a few in place — notice each reads like plain English, with the action and event doing the heavy lifting:

Figure 1 — The Triggers panel (a simplified mock-up, not a real screenshot): each trigger reads as a sentence — an action ("Jump", "Change state", "Show", "Play") fired by an event ("when user clicks", "when timeline starts").

💡 Read your triggers out loud. The fastest way to catch a mistake is to read a trigger as the sentence it is. "Jump to next slide when user clicks Start" — does that describe what you want? If the sentence sounds wrong, the trigger is wrong. This habit will save you more debugging time than any other tip in Part 3.

🧰 Common Actions & Events

You'll build hundreds of triggers from a surprisingly small vocabulary. Here are the workhorses — the actions and events that cover the vast majority of everything you'll ever make.

Two events deserve a special shout-out because you'll use them constantly. "When the timeline starts" is your setup event — play narration, hide something, reset a look the moment a slide opens. "When the timeline ends" is your finish event — reveal a Continue button, auto-advance, mark a slide done. Together with "when the user clicks," these three events power most of e-learning.

Notice one entry pointing forward: set/adjust a variable. Variables are the third pillar (Lesson 14), and triggers are how you change them. States, triggers, and variables were always designed to work as a team — you're two-thirds of the way to the full toolkit.

🔢 Order Matters: Triggers Run Top-Down

When several triggers share the same event — say three things should happen "when the user clicks Submit" — Storyline runs them in order, from top to bottom of the panel. This is easy to forget and a very common source of "why did it do that?" moments, so let's make it stick.

Here's the anatomy and the flow of a single trigger, condition included:

Figure 2 — A trigger's flow: the event fires, the optional condition is checked, and the action runs only if the condition passes.

Why this matters: ordering and conditions are what turn a pile of triggers into reliable logic. Most Storyline "bugs" beginners hit aren't bugs at all — they're triggers in the wrong order or a missing condition. Getting deliberate about sequence now will make every interaction you build behave.

📝 Two Worked Examples

Let's assemble two real triggers in words, exactly as the wizard would build them.

💡 Where to attach a trigger: you can create a trigger with any object selected — it lives on the slide but is usually associated with the object in its event ("when user clicks this"). Don't overthink it; the wizard shows the full sentence, so what matters is that the sentence is right, not which object was selected when you clicked +.

🎯 Try It: Your First Triggers

📓 Learning Journal

📝 Lesson Summary

🎉 What You've Accomplished

You just built the engine. With triggers, your slides can navigate, respond, and change on cue — and you did it by writing sentences, not code. Two pillars down (states and triggers), and together they already let you make genuinely interactive content. This is the skill that shows up in every job description; you now have its foundation.

❓ Common Questions at This Stage

🔭 Looking Ahead

In Lesson 14, we add the third pillar: variables — the memory of your course. You'll see how triggers set and read variables, and how conditions use them to build things like "greet the learner by name" and "unlock Continue only when everything's been visited."

✅ Before the Next Lesson

• Keep your two-trigger slide — it's the launch pad for variables and conditions
• Write this lesson's journal prompt: an interaction you want, phrased as a trigger sentence
• Practice adding one more trigger — try "show a layer when the user clicks an object"

📚 Additional Resources

• Course Glossary — trigger, action, event, condition, Trigger Wizard
• Quick-Reference Cheat Sheet — common trigger recipes
• E-Learning Heroes — trigger tutorials and downloadable examples