Rapid Intake Flashform Review

 UPDATE: Since this original review I’ve spoken more with Rapid Intake and have changed some of my opinions. Read this review, then read the updated review.

On the surface, Rapid Intake Flashform looks like a very promising course authoring tool, but the reality simply does not live up to the promise. The Rapid Intake web site is slick, polished and well designed; it does a great job of promoting the products and drawing you in, but the product does not meet the lofty expectations set by the marketing hype. Kudos to the marketing department for a job well done, I wish I could say the same thing for the actual product. I don’t want to just bash Flashform, but I will say I was disappointed. It does have a lot of features and is certainly much cheaper than many other authoring tools. Flashform also rated well in the customer satisfaction survey I read.

Usability

Usability was the major stumbling block for me. Flashform is a very simple tool that suffers from poor interface design and usability issues. The UI doesn’t follow standard conventions – the buttons are split into two toolbars, one at the top of the screen the other at the bottom. Normal convention is to have toolbars and menus at the top of the screen, or in palettes that can be moved around.

Flashform is the right name for this product because that’s what it is – a Flash based application that uses form fields for creating courses. Flashform looks and feels like a Flash executable, which isn’t inherently bad, but in this case the implementation is lacking. For example, with most applications when I expand the application window to full screen I don’t expect all the interface elements to scale, I expect more screen real estate for my work area. Expand this browser window to full screen and the menus and toolbars stay the same size, but the viewing area gets bigger without scaling anything. Flashform scaled everything, like a Flash file does when you view it at full screen. It’s just odd for an application.

Other usability issues include:

• For some changes Flashform does not prompt you to save unsaved changes when closing the file. For example, when adding a sound file it prompted me to save, but when I changed screen text it did not.
• When publishing, there was no indication that publishing finished.
• You must save projects in different directories or else published files will be overwritten. I had two project files saved in the same directory, so whenever I published or changed themes it overwrote the other project with no warning.
• Switching between project files does not work. When I tried loading a second project it looked like it refreshed the screen and the title bar changed, but the content was from the fist file.

Features Review

By now, you’be probably got the idea that I don’t recommend this tool, so I’m not going to go into great detail on all the features and functions, I’ll give you the highlights.

Text Editing
Text editing is clunky at best. Issues I encountered included:

• There is no undo and no spell checker. (This actually shocked me, undo is the most basic of functionality.)
• Pressing CTRL+B inserts an unknown character, erasing the text. I expected bold text.
• To make a bullet, you have to select the entire line of text, not just have your cursor in the line.
• There is only one level of bullets, no sub-bullets. I tried adding sub-bullets in HTML code, but the player just ignored them.

Additionally, you cannot import content, although you can edit the XML. If you have some programming background, you can convert existing content to properly formatted XML and then use it to start a new course. That’s a work-around, but I consider it a plus. I like programs that let you into the source files.

Media
When adding media, files are copied to the project folder. That’s good. I don’t have to worry about moving files to the correct location before importing, which makes my unorganized file management a little easier.

When trying to link to an MP3 file I got the following error message:

A script in this movie is causing Flash Player 9 to run slowly. If it continues to run your computer may become unresponsive. Do you want to abort the script? [Yes] [No]

I clicked Yes to abort, but Flashform imported the audio and automatically included a basic player. There was no volume control on the player, which I think is required.

Adding images is straight forward, but there are very limited options for placement. You also can’t resize images, it chooses the size for you based on the screen type. Images must be sized to fit the place holder before you import. This is the only authoring tool I’ve seen that doesn’t allow you to resize images after they’ve been placed on a screen.

Futhermore, Flashform only supports JPG images. There is no support for GIF or PNG. Flash has great support for PNG files, so that surprised me. Also, I got above error when trying to link to an image, but it worked. I don’t like seeing error messages that mean nothing.

Themes and Course Structure
Flashform segments courses into topics which include pages. The fact that Flashform allows for Topics with pages is good. The table of contents can have multiple levels and you can move topics and pages around. It’s not always easy, but once you figure it out it becomes routine.

Flashform comes with a lot of stock themes that define the look and feel of a course. I changed the course theme, which changed one of my topics into a page, thus breaking the structure of my course. I used the Promote button to make it a topic again, but it stuck it at the bottom of the TOC. I was then unable to move the screens originally in the topic back into the topic. That was little frustrating. I eventually figured out that to get screens back into the topic I had to move the screens to the top level, then move them down, then demote them. Very odd. It should be drag and drop. This is Flash, so that shouldn’t be hard to manage.

PowerPoint Conversion
I tried the PowerPoint tools, and was completely unimpressed. It will convert PowerPoint to flash, but as a single SWF embedded in a page. I assumed it would convert the PPT file and create a page for each PowerPoint screen. You can also create a screen capture while the presentation is running, but I don’t really see the point of that. The capture software is basic, it just records whatever is on the screen as a movie, which it then converts to an SWF.

Quiz Tool
The quiz tool is pretty cumbersome, although I did get it to work. I created a quiz with two questions, but only the first question displayed when I previewed the course the first time. Amongst all the options on the quiz screen there is one that says “number of questions to display”. That is set to 1 by default, so as you add questions you have manually change the number. I also got a security warning from Flash about an unsafe operation when I clicked the “check answer” button. I didn’t think the quiz tool was very intuitive. It does have some options for tracking via an LMS, but I didn’t use an LMS to test the feature.

Summary

Flashform makes it easy to create a very basic course, or presentation, but you have to really plan things out and design specifically for this tool. I found reworking course structure cumbersome and changing themes problematic. I suppose if you storyboarded extensively this tool could work well, but I would be concerned about reworking course sequence or structure later on.

You are better off spending more money on a tool like Lectora or Outstart Trainer. For around the same price Articulate Presenter offers a more mature and easier to use tool. Bottom line, Flashform is not all it’s cracked up to be. The marketing department gets kudos for making this product sound really cool.

Now the disclaimer: This review is based on my experience with the trial version of Flashform. Based on the customer satisfaction survey I saw I assume other people have had a much better experience. Please feel free to comment and correct any misconceptions.