StoryMap

StoryMapJS is a free tool to help you tell stories on the web that highlight the locations of a series of events. It is a new tool, yet stable in our development environment, and it has a friendly authoring tool.

There are a couple ways you can make a StoryMap.

• Maps

  Add a slide for each place in your story. Setting the location is as easy as a text search for the name or address. You can change the visual style of your map with a few presets, or you can use Mapbox to create your own style.

• Preventing frustration is just one of the key reasons teams need to understand their user journey. Knowing everything that happens between your product and its users helps your team make faster fixes and better product developments.Story maps are a visual approach to backlogs, making it easier to see how users interact with your product. They’re also a great way to sort out which developments to prioritize.
  

  Story maps help you:

  • Map out user actions within your product

  • Understand what users are experiencing
  • See which areas of the project will be the most challenging to develop
  • Understand what is required with new product versions

  This new level of insight will help you get on the same page with your team, helping you create a better product development experience–and a better user experience, too.

  What story maps are (and why they beat backlogs)

  Story mapping is a tool that lets you visualize the user journey. User story maps show each step your customers take while using your product.

  You may already know that backlogs are an important part of managing projects in Jira, but the backlog format (a long list) often makes it difficult immediately see what’s going on in the project. That’s especially true once your list of issues starts growing and you keep adding new versions of your product.

  That’s precisely where story mapping comes in: story maps are a visualization tool for backlogs.

  User story maps are a set up as swim lane flowchart. There is a backbone of user activities along the top of the chart, and underneath each of those activities there will be a list of all of the related sprints and versions.

  Story Maps are great tools for telling the story of your area of interest, be it a watershed, a county, or another extent. Story Maps are particularly useful for communicating information about the current projects and goals of your organization. This page will walk you through the fundamentals of creating an engaging, descriptive Story Map.

  Examples

  The Madison Watershed

  The Deep Creek Watershed

  The Musselshell Watershed

  The Bighorn Watershed

   

  Based on these examples, think about what data you’ll want to obtain in order to convey your story.

  Note: While these instructions were written specifically for watershed groups, the same principles and methods can apply to county extension service areas, city boundaries, or national forests.

  Downloading Data

  In order to create a map, you need data!

  If your area of interest is a watershed, here are some datasets you might need to tell your story:

  • Watershed boundaries/outline – HUC8, HUC10, and HUC12 watersheds can be downloaded from the National Hydrography dataset.
  • Streams and rivers within your watershed – This data can be queried out from the National Hydrography dataset to obtain flowlines for your watershed.
  • Monitoring sites – This data can be downloaded from MSUEWQ’s Data Hub in .csv format as described in this document. If you store data in the MSUEWQ Data Hub, you can download a list of sites from there with links to the sites’ data and photos. Your organization may also have monitoring site data in an excel file.
  • Project locations, historical sites, or points of interest – If you don’t have a shapefile of these already, the easiest way to import these into Story Maps is to create a .csv file with the latitude and longitude.

  Watch the following videos for guidance on obtaining data from the National Hydrography Dataset and the Data Hub: