Stop giving your SMEs access to Storyline

Last month, a post in r/instructionaldesign hit 52 upvotes with this opener: "I finally stopped trying to turn my SMEs into designers and my life is so much better."

The story: an ID gave subject matter experts direct access to Storyline to speed up content entry. Within days she was fielding panicked calls about broken triggers. Then spending three hours fixing a single slide because a SME "just wanted to move a text box."

Sound familiar? I've seen some version of this play out at nearly every organization I've consulted with. The instinct makes sense — if the SME puts the content in directly, that cuts out a round of back-and-forth. But it almost never works that way. What you actually get is a course that's technically broken, a SME who's frustrated with tools they never asked to learn, and an ID who's now spending triple the time cleaning up the mess.

The problem isn't your SMEs. It's the handoff.

The real bottleneck in course production

A training manager who interviewed 20 corporate L&D professionals said it plainly: "The bottleneck isn't technology or budget. It's subject matter expert time. I can get budget for tools. I can't get four hours of my senior engineer's time to review a training module."

That's the actual constraint. Not the authoring tool. Not the template. The scheduling friction and cognitive overhead of asking someone who's an expert in their job to suddenly become a course developer.

Mid-size organizations — roughly 500 to 2,000 employees — feel this most. Small teams move fast because the trainer often is the SME. Large enterprises have dedicated content production staff. But the middle tier has specialized SMEs who are booked solid, where asking for content review requires political capital to cash in.

So if direct tool access doesn't work, and a slow review process kills projects, what does work?

Meet them where they already live

The ID in that Reddit thread solved it the way most experienced IDs eventually solve it: she moved the SME interaction out of Storyline and into PowerPoint. SMEs fill in a familiar slide deck. She handles the rest.

It's not glamorous, but it works. Here's why: the cognitive load of "add your content here" in a PPT template is almost zero. The cognitive load of "log into Storyline, find the right slide, don't accidentally click the wrong layer" is enormous for someone who uses the tool once a quarter.

The question isn't what format is most convenient for the ID. It's what format makes it easiest for the SME to actually give you what you need.

The structured intake approach

PPT works, but it's loose. A SME might fill in text and forget about the quiz. Another might change the slide layout and break your template. The content comes back in the right container but not always in the right shape.

A better version of this is a structured intake — something that asks the SME for specific pieces, in order:

• Section overview: what does the learner need to know?
• Key points per slide (capped at three, because that's all that fits anyway)
• Quiz question for this section, with four answer options
• Image direction: describe what should be on screen

That last one matters more than it sounds. When you hand a SME a blank slide and say "add an image," they'll either ignore it or drop in a stock photo that makes no sense. When you ask them "describe the scene you want the learner to see," suddenly you have real direction to work from.

The output from a structured intake drops straight into your production workflow. No guessing what they meant. No chasing down missing pieces. The course builds faster because the inputs are clean.

What this looks like in practice

A few patterns I've seen work well:

The PowerPoint skeleton method: build a master PPT template that mirrors your course structure. Lock everything except the content areas. Send it to the SME. Get it back. Build the course. Simple, but you lose some validation — you can't stop a SME from typing a 400-word paragraph into a "3 bullet points max" field.

The Google Form interview works surprisingly well for linear courses. Create a form with sections mirroring the course structure. Each question is a specific content element. SME fills it out asynchronously, you get a spreadsheet. Good for SMEs who prefer to type; annoying for anyone who thinks in visuals.

The structured storyboard with defined fields is the version that scales. Build a storyboard template (in any format) where each slide has labeled content zones. The SME sees exactly what goes where. You get a document you can hand off directly to production — or in some cases, feed directly into an automated build pipeline.

The last approach is where things start to get interesting from a production standpoint. When SME inputs are structured and consistent, you can automate a lot of the assembly work. Layouts, interactions, even image generation can be templated. The bottleneck shifts from production to QA, which is a much better place for it to be.

The common mistake

Most teams have a content review process. They have an authoring tool, and they have a review tool (Articulate Review, ReviewLink, whatever). What they don't have is a structured intake process that happens before the build starts.

So the ID builds a course based on their interpretation of a 40-slide PowerPoint deck and some email chains. Then sends it to the SME for review. The SME sees it in a review tool, makes 47 comments, half of which are corrections to things that could have been caught before a single slide was built.

Moving the conversation upstream — before the build — saves more time than any production shortcut.

Practical next steps

If you're currently doing ad-hoc intake (email threads, unstructured decks, Zoom calls where you take notes), try one thing: build a simple storyboard template that has labeled fields for content, quiz questions, and image direction. Share it with your next SME before you build anything.

You'll immediately see where the friction is. Maybe the SME won't know how to describe an image. Maybe they'll write three paragraphs where you needed three bullets. Those are the friction points you need to design around — and you can't find them until you've made the intake explicit.

The tools matter less than the process. Storyline or Rise or whatever you build in — it doesn't help if the content arriving for production is unstructured, incomplete, or wrong.

Get the handoff right first. The production work gets easier from there.

Happy Alien's Storyboard2Rise converts structured storyboard documents directly into Rise 360 courses — skipping the manual block-building step entirely. If you're experimenting with structured intake workflows, it's worth a look.