Every Widget so far added to Captivate 13 has been a massive step back in terms of usability, customization and user-friendliness. It's like we traveled back in time to 15 years ago. Seriously, since 12.6+ Captivate felt like the worst way to do eLearning, everything is done in the worst, most obtuse way possible, and somehow we lost features that the software had since inception.

Right now, in Captivate 13, if you use a Widget, you're locked out of most actions/interactions/triggers that Captivate normally offers, because they are treated as entirely self-contained, separate feature. Objects within Widget do not qualify for any Slide triggers. Making using them a massive pain.

For example, take Hotspot widget - do you want to add some nice highlights or entrance animations to the Hotspot prompts? Can't do it. At best you can make them appear on timeline. But you can't highlight them for users so that they know they are a clickable item.

Within each Widget, you have exactly one single Trigger - Click/Tap and exactly a single Action - Play Media. Extremely limited. Media that is being played can also overlap with other audio if user clicks them fast enough, and you have no usual access to stop/pause timeline or stop media triggers.

Audio being played within each Hotspot overlay also doesn't have an option for its own captions/text to speech. Meaning you have to pre-record the audio somewhere else, on a blank slide, and then import it. I can go on.

Widgets, by virtue of being completely isolated from the rest of the slide structure, at the moment are immediately a very limiting experience. You lose so many features and capabilities in exchange for some basic animations. You can't do text-to-speech within them as they can only play pre-recorded audio, and that's the only interaction/action you get.

I am seriously going to petition our organization to roll back to Classic Captivate. Responsive Captivate (v12+) feels like a fever dream, where everything good from old Captivate versions has been stripped out, and replaced with frankenstein's monster of removed features, half-baked implementations, and terrible end-user and learner experience as a result.

I don't know, frankly, who in their right mind would chose the modern Captivate software over anything else on the market, unless you have no choice or say in the matter. In the end, this is all about the quality and speed of content you can create, and this modern Captivate is objectively one of the worst ways to create elearning right now. Yes its cheap, but you dont even get what you pay for - you get a barely functional piece of software.

Let's not even mention the constant crashing, the fact that the software still doesn't have auto-save feature in year 2025 and numerous bugs where you can never be sure what you see is what the end learner will see.