Making your Canva content interactive is a great way to increase engagement and knowledge retention. Here’s a guide to how you can quickly and easily make your Canva content interactive with Near-Life.
Why make your content interactive?
More and more studies show that when you make your content interactive, you increase engagement.
Interactive video creates 66% more engagement and 44% longer viewing time.
This means content is more likely to be absorbed, remembered and acted upon than in an equivalent linear video. This makes interactive video extremely useful in situations such as learning, education and training, marketing, storytelling, gaming and customer service.
Why Canva is a superb tool when creating interactive content
If you’re familiar with Canva, you’ll probably already be aware of all the awesome resources they have, from images and videos to music.
This means Canva makes it extremely straightforward to create the core content that you can then bring to life in Near-Life as an interactive video, interactive quiz, interactive presentation and so on.
How to make an interactive video with Canva
1) Making a plan or storyboard
If you’ve never made an interactive video before or you’re not very experienced, making a detailed plan should always be your first priority. Here are a few things you’ll want to consider:
- What is the topic of the video?
- How do you want the user to interact? Will they be clicking on buttons, text, areas of the screen, images?
- How long will each scene need to be, so the user has enough time to interact with it?
- Will the video have a ‘start’ or ‘play’ screen to begin?
- Will you be scoring the end user, or giving them feedback based on their choices?
We recommend making a storyboard before you make your media. It will give you an understanding of how your video will work and how many scenes you will need. Storyboarding is a feature Near-Life offers that allows you to map out your interactive video like a flowchart. You can later drag and drop your media into it.
2) Making your content with Canva
If you’re downloading your content as still images, you don’t need to worry about timings. However, if you want to download them as videos, you’ll have to make sure each slide is set to the correct length. Near-Life does offer a feature to freeze the scene at the end of play-through until the end-user makes a decision, which can be helpful when working with shorter videos. You’ll also want your slides downloaded as separate files, not as one whole video. Otherwise you’ll have to go through and clip each scene.
At this point, you should also know whether you want the user to interact by clicking on buttons, images or text. If you’re using buttons, you can either make them on Canva or add them on Near-Life. If you choose to add them later on Near-Life, ensure that you leave space on your media for them so they won’t cover anything important. To make them on Canva you can search ‘button’ in elements, or use any type of shape you want.
Remember that when you go onto Near-Life, the video will only branch where a decision is made. This means that you should only end each scene when the end-user is required to interact. For example, if you give the user information on a topic in one slide, and in the next you ask them questions about the topic that they will need to answer, you can download both slides into one scene.
3) Making your Canva content interactive
3.1 Making a project and adding a new scenario
Once you’re on Near-Life, add a new project. You can store multiple scenarios in the same project. You also have the option to duplicate entire scenarios here. With your new project made, add a new scenario. Name it appropriately.
3.2 If you made a storyboard already
You can upload the media and drag and drop each clip into the right node. Then you can refine the interactions, ensuring hotspots line up. You should preview your video a few times to ensure everything is how it should be.
3.3 If you didn’t make a storyboard
You can build the interactions as you go, using hotspots and/or buttons to create each new node. You also have a pop-up option when you hotspot the screen, text or images. This means that when the end-user clicks on the hotspot, it will open a tab on the screen that can give more information and/or show an image.
3.4 Building the interactions
To start building the video, go to your first interaction. Let’s say you made a start button on Canva. Add a hotspot rectangle or circle, depending on your button’s shape, and shape it around the size of your button. With your hotspot shaped, you can name the interaction, eg ‘start’. Under ‘hotspot visibility’, you can select whether the hotspot will always show, show only on hover, or not show at all.
Under the ‘go to’ section, click ‘create new’. This will create a new node on the canvas for the next scene. You’ll have the same option with all the other overlays. If you’re giving the user different options that lead to a different outcomes, you’ll want to click ‘create new’ for each overlay. However, if you want to direct your user to the same node regardless of what they clicked, after you’ve clicked ‘create new’ on your first overlay, go to that new node and name it. Then go to the other overlays on the first node and select the name of the new node under the ‘go to’ section. This will then direct all the overlays to the same new node when clicked.
When you get further into your video and have more nodes created, you may want to direct your user back to specific nodes. To do this, simply click the name of that node under the ‘go to’ section. This will then direct the user to that node.
3.5 Capturing the name or Email
You can choose to capture the username or email of end-users on Near-Life. This means when you later look at insights (the 3 bars on the top right of the canvas) you can see how people have performed at an individual level. To do this, go to settings on your scenario. Then tick to capture the username or capture the email.
3.6 Setting up scoring
If you want to give the end-user points when they click the correct answers, go to the button or hotspot with the right answer. Tick the ‘score’ box and select how many points to add.
At the end of the video you can show the end-user their score and whether they passed or failed. To set this up, go to the Settings tab for the scenario and tick the pass score and drag it to where you want it to be. This is a quicker way than using inventory, but means you can’t give a personalised message to the end-user based on how many questions they got right/wrong.
3.7 Setting up inventory
Inventory and notebook are available with the Creator+ subscription. Inventory is another way of showing the end user how well they did. By adding an achievement on the correct answers and creating an inventory item such as ‘Correct’, you can make the game tally how many ‘Correct’ answers the user has gotten. Then you could use conditions to control what the end user would see. Notebook allows the user to take down notes during the interactive experience that they can refer to within the scenario.
For example, you can set that when the end-user gets 2 correct, they see a screen saying ‘Oh dear, you only got 2 out of 5 right – you should review worksheets 1-5.’ You can give a personalised message for each of the scores out of 5. You can do this by creating a text overlay, then scrolling down to add a condition. Set the condition that the text will only appear when ‘correct’ is equal to ‘2’. Repeat this process for each of the messages depending on how many they got right.
4) Sharing your interactive video
When you’re happy with your video, you can publish it and share it. You will not be able to share the video until it’s published. If you update the video, you can republish it to make the changes live.
5) Analysing your interactive video’s performance
If you want to look at insights about the video, such as how many people have played it and what answers they gave, go to the insights button in the top right of the screen. When you choose to collect people’s email or username, you will be able to see performance at an individual level. If not, you will be able to see collective information. Republishing the video will clear the insights.
See more interactive content made with Canva
You can see examples of interactive content made with Canva – including quizzes, presentations and games here.
Learn more and get started making your own interactive content.
Near-Life makes it easy for learning professionals, educators and anyone seeking to communicate knowledge effectively to create immersive and engaging interactive video, VR, and gamified content.
Click here to get started.