Guidelines for Your First Authorware Project
by Shelley Hesse

1. Select appropriate content for your first project. Your first course or application should be relatively small, preferably with the content already identified. Something that is being converted from instructor-led or a workbook is ideal. This will allow you to focus your energies on the Authorware programming and not content analysis. The small size will allow you to showcase the benefits of the product before your managers begin to lose patience.

2. Spend adequate amount of time on design and planning. Don't be too eager to begin programming in Authorware. You will save yourself more time in the long run by spending the upfront time on the design and storyboarding and decrease the amount of rework in Authorware.

3. Develop a prototype. After you have done the content analysis and design, select a short segment of your course or application to develop completely as a prototype. All of the persons who have signoff on the project should review the prototype. This will help to test your design more completely, as well as the development and review process itself.

4. Set realistic expectations. The industry average for multimedia training development time is approximately 350 man-hours of development for one hour of training. You may be asking what is one hour of training? That's a whole other discussion itself. Briefly, it is defined as "seat time". The actual amount of time the end user will be sitting through the training. Even that is difficult, if not impossible to measure until after the training is completed. One rule of thumb that I use is that the average user can go through 2 frames or pages in one minute. Based on that, you can calculate that 120 pages make up one hour of training. Realize that the 350 hours includes all phases of development such as content analysis, design, storyboarding, prototyping, graphics development, audio production, Authorware programming, testing, and implementation. Generally, the Authorware programming is only about 20-25% of that 350 hours. If you convert an instructor-led course or a workbook, you should be able to significantly reduce the hours it takes to produce the content.

5. Test, test and then re-test. Most people working on their first project fail to allow adequate testing time. In my schedules, I generally provide 8 hours of testing by the developer once they have completed the Authorware programming, and another review by the project manager of the Authorware file. Once the Authorware file is packaged for delivery, be sure and test again. In rare cases, I have seen where something worked fine, but then stopped working once it was packaged. Be sure and test every path that the user may take and every response a user may make on a given interaction. If you get others involved in testing, which you should, provide them with a test plan that includes what they should look for, and how they should go through the materials. Also, be sure and test it the way your users will be viewing it. If you are developing for the web and most of your end users will be viewing over a dialup modem, you should test in that environment.