Title screen of the Spot the Smish Storyline project, with the Ace Detective Agency theme.

Spot the Smish

Project Summary

Smishing is phishing by text message, and it works because it targets the people least equipped to spot it. A scam text lands on the most personal screen someone owns, dressed up as a bank alert or a missed delivery, and the folks most likely to tap the link, older adults and people with limited digital literacy, are exactly the ones traditional security training never reaches.

Spot the Smish is our answer: an interactive Storyline project where learners join the Ace Detective Agency and work through three micro-lessons, culminating in hands-on practice inspecting suspicious texts for red flags that give scammers away, such as urgent requests, typos, and sketchy links. My project partner and I built it as a two-person team for an independent graduate study we proposed ourselves: the LDT program had no course covering Articulate Storyline, so we pitched one with a simple goal, to learn the tool by building something real. On the visual and audio side, I designed a retro radio player in Illustrator and animated it in After Effects, recorded the voiceover, and helped write the script. On the build side, I created the hot-spot activity: I wrote an example scam text, placed it on a phone graphic, and marked the warning signs with red-flag hot spots. Clicking or hovering on a flag animates in an info box explaining why that detail should raise suspicion, so learners get the lesson at the exact moment they’re curious. I also added the trigger to the radio’s volume button and gave it a glowing animation so learners could tell it was interactive. Since we were both new to Storyline triggers, my partner and I troubleshot them together.

Details

  • Goal: Teach mobile phone users, especially older adults and people with limited digital literacy, to recognize the red flags of a scam text before they tap anything.

  • Type: Interactive eLearning Project (Articulate Storyline)

  • Context: Graduate independent study, Learning Design and Technology, CU Denver

  • Audience: Mobile phone users, especially senior citizens and adults with limited digital literacy

  • Responsibilities: Storyline Development (co-developer), Audio Production, Script Writing, Motion Graphics, Visual Design, Peer Review

  • Tools Used: Articulate Storyline, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe After Effects, Google Workspace, Claude, Grammarly

Retro radio player from the Radio micro-lesson in the Storyline player, with a glowing volume button showing learners it's interactive.
Hot-spot activity in the Storyline player, showing a suspicious text message with red flags and an open info box explaining one of the warning signs.

Design Process

We started as a team in Google Docs and Slides, generating ideas and pinning down scope and goals so everyone was building the same thing.

We mapped the project into three micro-lessons, each with a different job: Radio for absorbing information by ear, Hot Spots for practicing connections between concepts, and Spot the Smish for hands-on application. All three live in the linked project.

We built a detective-themed mood board in Google Slides to set the tone and outline the lesson flow, which made peer review fast. I used AI tools to brainstorm the detective script, then we shaped the drafts together. My partner created the characters and environments in Vyond, while I focused on the interface graphics and motion work in Illustrator and After Effects.

We originally planned to split the work between Rise and Storyline, but decided to build everything in Storyline so learners could stay on a single screen rather than scroll. That choice brought a better experience at the cost of harder builds: the triggers fought us, and working through slides, layers, states, and conditions in regular troubleshooting sessions with my partner is where most of our Storyline skills actually got built, which was the point of the independent study in the first place.