I have been playing around with Evolve, here are my feedback thoughts so far:
A simplified mode and advanced mode would be helpful. There are so many options for many items that it gets confusing. By having a simplified and advanced mode, you can make it easier to start using Evolve. I figured out Rise quickly without needing to do much research online. Evolve has more options which is great, but quite overwhelming in the beginning. So to help people over the hump of learning a new software I think a simplified mode would be helpful.
A wysiwyg mode (yes I know about quick preview and live preview), but editing themes is a pita. I can’t see how my changes are affecting the overall look of the theme until I use it on an article. Sometimes I can’t even see what the change was which leads me to my next suggestion …
Maybe I have not found it yet, but a wiki or something that shows me what each option does with it on/off. It can be hard to figure out what the option will do from the short descriptions.
I tend to go back and forth between my theme and the course as I fine tune the theme, and when I do that it turns off quick preview which is very annoying.
*All those color options in the theme are again overwhelming. A simplified color theming with 3-4 colors would be great.
If it was a bit quicker to figure out and more intuitive, I think it would overall be better than Rise/Storyline. It has the options of storyline with a quicker timeline to create like rise. However, all those options slow down my use, since I have to figure out what each one does and whether I want to use it or not.
For me the simplified/advanced mode and help article with on/off for each option would be the most important to me. My apologies if these are available, I looked for them in help but did not find it.
Hi @msd thanks so much for such detailed feedback. This is really helpful to us and much appreciated.
I completely understand the pain points you list here. We are aware that in it’s current form Theming is complex and time consuming. Creating a simpler experience is on our roadmap, but I can’t give a firm timescale for this yet.
I hope these points don’t stop you from using Evolve in the future. We are constantly updating Evolve to improve the experience for our users, and we have some great enhancements planned for the coming months.
It’s interesting to read this. About 9 months ago I was around the same point as you are - our small team even tested A. 360 - which isn’t as intuitive as Evolve in my opinion.
And we had to make the right decision, because we have some employees, who are “Pros” and just know how to work with authoring tools and other creative programs. But we also have employees, who need to put content in our LMS very quickly without having the knowledge, that we have.
Configuring the theme can be a bit annyoing…especially changing the color of specific elements takes a few more seconds until it is updated in live preview. I can only recommend you, not to use quick preview for changing the theme. The live preview is better in my opinion, expecially if you use a huge display or at least two displays - you can organize your windows and put the theme editor on one side and the Live Preview on the other. However it will take it’s time to update the look of your course, as I already mentioned.
About the wiki: if you relate it to the themes, yeah - there needs to be an improvement. I’m at a point where I usually know what I have to do to adapt the theme at the desired point. But it could be easier, especially for newbies. Unfortunately, with high functionality comes complexity.
Besides the themes I can recommend you to use the Intellum Experience (Link) to learn more about the functions of Evolve. What I really love is, that almost everywhere in Evolve you can find the “Mortarboard-Icon” which will lead you right to the Intellum Experience.
