Captivate 8 - Next Button Works Only After Viewing Slide

Just a personal opinion: I don't like that kind of 'forcing' a user, especially if it is an adult. And I hope you don't provide a playbar because in that case the user will be able to scrub right through the course till the end.

It could be done with a conditional advanced/shared action on Enter of each slide. You'll need a user variable per slide, a Boolean, that you change on the first visit from a default value of 0 to 1, after having checked its value.

I don't kow if the "Continue" button is a normal button or a shape button? I recommend a shape button because you can time it for the rest of the project (set it always on top). At least then it will have always the same ID.

Condition will look like:

IF v_slide1 is equal to 0

     Hide Bt_Next

     Assign v_slide1 with 1

     Continue

ELSE

    Show Bt_Next

    Continue

Not sure if Continue is necessary, depends on the setup of the slides.

I guess the problem is how do you know a user has viewed the entire slide or just glanced at it for a moment, i'm not sure how you can ever know that? Or am i missing something obvious here?

Instructional Designers don't usually think that way.  If you want to know if somebody has consumed the content, develop an interaction that they THEN need to do in order to PROVE they did view the content and learned something.

Have it so it doesn't appear on the timeline until other elements have appeared (done what they doing)

You choose 'Execute Advanced Action' in the dropdown list for On Enter.

The Next Button can have a simple action: Go to Next Slide, or Continue.

@windscorpion  your solution will not work, because the Next button has to be available right away at a second view of the slide. Got it?

OK got it, just wasn't 100% sure what the OP wanted

You are totally new to variables and advanced/shared actions? Do you really need this feature in that case, because you'll have to learn a bunch.

Long time ago I wrote an article as introduction to variables, link is in these posts: Curious about Variables in Captivate? - Captivate blog  and Unleash the Power of Variables in Captivate with Advanced Actions - Captivate blog

Variable is not attached to the button, you have to define a variable for each slide. I showed one 'v_slide1' but you'll have 'v_slide2'... or whatever you want to label them. Be sure to have a unique name for each variable and be aware that they are case sensitive.

I proposed not to use different buttons on different slides (makes it much more complicated because each button would have a different ID) but to put a shape button on the first slide, always on top, and timed for the rest of the project. It will be shown or hidden, depending on the conditional advanced action that is triggered by the On Enter event of each slide. That action will be different for each slide because the variable has to be changed. Since you use CP8, you can save the action as Shared action (have a sequence of articles about shared actions as well) with one parameter: the variable. Then you can apply that shared action to each slide, and just need to choose the right parameter-variable.

Parameters in Shared Actions - Captivate 7 vs. 8 - Captivate blog  

Follow Lilybiri's instruction in the above post. In swf, it much easier to use a custom widget especially with SCORM publishing as your progress will definitely be saved when the user returns.

The easiest method I've found is to put a button at the end of each slide that sets the specific slide variable and a continue action whrn clicked. Then create a perpetual button that displays for the rest of project that has the action gotoNextSlide. On Enter of each slide check if currentSlide is equal to the specific slide variable. If true, show the perpetual button., if false hide the button.

with javascript it is possible to actually create a variable that is an array so you can just use one variable, but you need to turn the variable back into an array on enter of every slide to determine progress.

The benefit of this is that if you are using SCORM 1.2 you can fill up your suspend data if you have a lot of slides and custom variables.