Unlocking Rise’s Full Potential With Code Blocks

The Challenge

Build richer training without leaving Rise

The content Shannon builds most is scenario-driven and interactive—branching scenarios, comparison tools, training games—because she knows passive, click-next courses don’t stick. Rise was already an important part of her workflow, but it came with an important caveat. The platform produced clean, responsive training, but the learner experience was mostly fixed. Shannon could adjust colors and reorder blocks, but she couldn’t control layout, interactions, or the way a course behaved.

Her main workaround was building complex interactions in Storyline, dropping them into Rise as embedded blocks, and accepting whatever visual control that allowed. Anything beyond Rise’s native content meant sending learners out of the experience entirely.

As a designer who always started with the experience she wanted to build, Shannon needed a way to close the gap between what she could picture and what Rise’s native blocks could produce—without leaving the platform to do it.

The Answer

From workaround to workflow with Rise Code Blocks

Everything shifted when Rise’s Code Blocks feature arrived, letting Shannon drop custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript directly into Rise.

For her first project with Code Blocks, Shannon decided to experiment with AI Avatars, which were already a value-add to her work. “Articulate’s AI avatars have changed how I do video,” says Shannon. “I can produce branded, on-message video intros for every lesson without a studio, a camera, or a re-record every time a script changes.”

With Code Blocks, she built a video wrapper for intros where bullet points on screen sync to the video as it plays. The points then display in lockstep with the content of the avatar’s speech. It was a solution to an ordinary problem—static supporting text that just sits there while a talking-head video plays—but watching the bullets light up on cue inside a Rise course opened up a new way of thinking about what the platform could do.

“That was my ‘Wait. I can do THAT in Rise?’ moment,” says Shannon. “After that, I couldn’t stop experimenting with Code Blocks.” She went on to use the feature to create elements like interactive tabs, scenario cards with reveal animations, and a full permissions comparison table with filter toggles.

Today, Shannon uses Code Blocks as a standard part of her toolkit. “Code Blocks give me total control over how information is presented,” she says. “They let me create whatever learning experience I picture, instead of whatever the default blocks allow.”

Unlocking Human Potential

Training that makes people ask, “How did you build that?”

With her new approach, Shannon saves significant production hours. While there’s an upfront investment in time when she builds a new kind of interaction—problem-solving, testing, iterating—two things offset it. First, Articulate’s AI features have cut her overall development time in half, helping Shannon organize her thinking, draft outlines, and write assessment questions to spec. Second, she reuses frequently and strategically. Once she’s solved a pattern—a video wrapper, a comparison table, a card layout—it becomes a component she drops into the next project instead of rebuilding from zero.

The reaction from stakeholders has been consistent: Most people want to know how the training was built in Rise. “They love how naturally the Code Blocks flow into the course, and that I can customize anything,” says Shannon. Colleagues who assumed Rise had a hard ceiling on what it could produce have changed their view after seeing her work—and several members of her own team have started exploring what’s possible themselves.

Before Code Blocks, Shannon was routing complex interactions to Storyline or accepting Rise’s defaults. After Code Blocks, Rise became the tool she builds everything in, and the design can finally catch up to the idea.

With Articulate 360 AI and Rise Code Blocks, a Senior Learning Experience Designer eliminated training design workarounds and cut development time in half—building fully custom, interactive content directly in Rise.