Glitchy Failure Captions in Captivate

Recently I’ve been working on a Captivate tutorial to help our facilitators better understand the thought process of troubleshooting a specific part of their course setup. This is basically a software simulation with an avatar & audio. Most slides have a clickable area within the LMS interface. This click box has both a hint caption and a failure caption. Each slide also has a hint button to give learners some extra tips.

Captivate slide with click box and hint button

The hint button was working fine, but I noticed during testing that some of the time the failure caption wasn’t showing up. I saw it some of the time, but not consistently. After a few tries, I figured out that the failure caption only appeared if the Hint button had already been clicked. If you skipped the hint and went right to trying to perform the action, you didn’t get any feedback at all.

I played with the timing and pause settings, but still got the same behavior (or created some new glitchy problem). I also noticed that a few of my slides were working just fine without any change to those settings. A-ha! The difference on the slides that were working was the order in the timeline. To get the failure captions to appear, the click box needs to be above the hint button in the timeline.

Captivate timeline with click box on top

It’s a simple solution, but I was feeling frustrated this afternoon until I figured it out. I want to record the solution so if this comes up again I will know to try this.

Has anyone else run into this issue? I’m using Captivate 3; I’m curious whether the same holds true for Captivate 4.

8 thoughts on “Glitchy Failure Captions in Captivate

    1. I have discovered that if weird things are happening in Captivate, I should start looking at my timeline order. That ends up being the solution for many problems. It’s still a good troubleshooting strategy all these years and versions later.

  1. Your timing couldn’t have been more fortunate! I was just taking a break from struggling with this very issue to read blogs, and came across the solution here.

    Thanks so much for saving me a lot of pain!

    1. You’re very welcome!

      I do feel a little better now. Shortly before I published this, I started second guessing myself. I wondered if this was one of those tricks that “everybody but me” knew. Clearly it’s hidden enough that I’m not the only one though!

  2. It was a total fluke that I had the order set differently on two slides and was able to make the connection. I was sure it was something in the timing and pause settings, but it seemed like this took care of it. Glad this was useful to you!

  3. I have had this problem and I think you just solved it for me. Never thought the timeline would cause this. Thanks for sharing your problem and solution so the rest of us can learn from your experience.

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