When a stakeholder says they want the training to be "interactive," they're rarely picturing the same thing as the person who has to build it. Interactive could mean a clickable diagram or a fully branching simulation with consequence-tracking. Those two things differ in cost by an order of magnitude — and quoting against the word instead of the work is how projects blow their budgets before they start.

The way out is a shared vocabulary. At Luna LXD I scope interactivity in four broad levels.

The four levels

  • Level 1 — Foundational. A clean, accessible page-turn with knowledge checks. Perfect when the goal is awareness or a policy refresher. Fast to build, easy to maintain.
  • Level 2 — Enriched. Infographics, custom diagrams, simple animation and short video, with moderate interaction. The workhorse level for most professional content.
  • Level 3 — Immersive. Branching scenarios and richer simulation, where judgement is the skill being practised and consequences play out. This is where Storyline earns its keep.
  • Level 4 — Bespoke. Advanced, custom or gamified interaction for the highest-stakes content — built when the decision the learner is rehearsing genuinely warrants it.
The expensive mistake

Defaulting everything to Level 3 because it sounds impressive. Most content doesn't need it — and the budget you burn there is budget you can't spend where decisions genuinely matter.

Scope to the content, not the ambition

The discipline is matching each topic to the level its content warrants. A definitions refresher and a deteriorating-patient simulation should not cost the same, and they shouldn't be built the same way. Spread a project across levels deliberately: Level 1 for the awareness pieces, Level 3 for the two or three moments where clinical judgement is the actual learning objective.

Done well, build levels do two things at once. They give you a defensible quote, and they force a useful conversation: which decisions in this course are actually hard, and worth the investment to rehearse? That question usually improves the training more than any single interaction does.