ArcGIS StoryMaps: An Introduction to the What, Why, and How of Storytelling with Maps

all right so my name is Satya I'm the product development lead for story maps and other products and with me today Allen couldn't join unfortunately and we have Cooper this place it's Cooper Thomas and together we'll be talking about the what why and how and also share a little bit of what's coming also you guys excited yes so let's get started I'm gonna actually pass it on to Cooper first and then and then I'll actually do the second part of this great thanks for the introduction Satya so as you mentioned my name is Cooper Thomas it is not Allen Carroll and in the interest of full transparency I'm not super familiar with this material so I'm just gonna kind of wing it bear with me so to begin I want to talk a little bit about the what of story maps and just by a show of hands how many of you have created a story map before great looks like most of you have so I'm probably gonna skim through this pretty quickly but I think it's still useful to go over just to make sure we're all kind of on the same page so story maps are configurable web applications that combine interactive maps and scenes with multimedia content like photos and videos and other you know content from the web a narrative text and they tell stories about the world this caption is actually a bit of a misnomer because we've seen story maps about Mars we've seen story maps about other sort of extraterrestrial bodies so they're not necessarily contained in scope to the planet we'll update this for next year story maps are responsive and so they're optimized to work on a variety of different devices screen sizes operating systems browsers so forth in particular PCs tablets and mobile devices and story maps also feature these interactive WYSIWYG or what you see is what you get builders which means that you can create a really compelling really beautiful story without having to write a line of code and our goal is to make sure that anyone can basically pick up story maps and create a really compelling really cool story without needing to know a whole lot a whole bunch of sort of technical mumbo-jumbo to get there in the end story maps are hosted by ESRI in the cloud either an ArcGIS online or in an enterprise or portal environment but they're also downloadable and customizable the classic apps in particular all have sort of public art public repos if you want to go and tweak them you can do that to your heart's content it but you might end up breaking things and that's on you story maps have also grown tremendously in popularity over the past seven or eight years this chart is just about cut off here but the initial story map was created in 2012 and since then you can see that the growth has been almost exponential this number here is from June 2019 and in the past couple weeks we've actually exceeded a million story maps and I believe that this figure only represents story maps that are publicly story maps and ArcGIS online so there are probably tens of thousands more on sort of private enterprise or portal systems so that's all well and good but why do we think that place-based storytelling is actually useful or important our team has identified three primary reasons and I'm gonna run through those really quickly and hopefully some of these will kind of maybe trigger some creative thinking on your end and maybe help you reevaluate how you're creating stories for your own audiences the first is that stories are inherently memorable compelling and impactful and they put people in a receptive state of mind a storytelling is really at the core of human communication we've been doing it since the Stone Age and I think for that reason in particular storytelling is much more likely to sort of evoke an emotional response from someone then say you know a paragraph of written narration or something more sort of dry and analytical and statistics based purely speculation on my part but make of that what you will in particular characters driven stories character-driven stories have proven to actually sort of rewire our brain chemistry and what I mean by that is studies have shown that character-driven stories and more specifically stories with some sort of protagonist whether that's a person or a a place or an animal or what have you they trigger the production of oxytocin which is this crazy like neuro chemical that makes people more receptive and more cooperative oxytocin is often called like the love I think it's called like the love hormone or something and it's something that mothers also produce absolutely after childbirth but it's also produced by these character-driven stories and as I mentioned just a minute ago studies have shown that not only does character-driven storytelling trigger the production of oxytocin in readers but that oxytocin itself actually contributes to readers willingness to commit I guess donate to charitable causes this particular statistic here is from a Stanford study I think from a few years back but it shows that folks that were experiencing the effects of oxytocin donated 50 per 656 percent more to charitable causes than the control group second-story maps and maps themselves engage both sides of the brain both sore the right side rational hyper logical side of the brain and the left creative artistic sides of the brain and because they're sort of lighting up both sides I think that creates a more sort of engaging an emotionally sort of responsive experience for the reader maps in particular are and thematic maps in particular I guess are designed to sort of help us make sense of Geographic phenomena and in that sense they're really activating that right side of the brain but maps can also be beautiful and so too can story maps especially when they incorporate other compelling visuals like photos and and other media and so in that sense they're also kind of activating and engaging that left side of the brain the more creative more artistic more subjective and thoughtful side and third story maps have proven to be really sticky what we mean by that is that people spend a lot of time reading story maps on average readers spent approximately 30 seconds 37 seconds on a web page and in comparison in 2017 we found that the average time spent on our team produced story maps was 5 minutes and 43 seconds which is you know the order of magnitude more than seven seconds I don't actually know math if that is an order of magnitude or not but it's a lot more than 37 seconds so story maps engage the mind and delight the eye they empowered doing GIS without even realizing it I think those this sentence here kind of consolidates a lot of those three that the highlights of those three points that I just mentioned they engaged mine they make us excited they make us think they're also just cool to look at and people seem to like them and those are three reasons why you should consider using story maps so if you've decided that you want to make a story map there are a number of different things you can do to ensure that it really sings and that it resonates with your target audience I'm going to quickly run through nine different tips that our team has put together for effective storytelling and in particular effective place-based storytelling with story maps the first is to start with the bang and this is true for story maps as well as any other kind of digital media really you don't really want to kind of ease into this story you want to present something that sort of grabs your reader's attention and draws them into this story and this applies both to sort of the cover media we think it's we think it's really effective to come up with a really gripping title and have like a nice animated video in the background but it also applies to like the lead of your story the nut graft you really want to draw people in and create something that's exciting and that they're really interested in reading rather than just sort of like a more sort of analytical like abstract or something as the first paragraph of your story this animation here is an example our team produced this story a few years ago it went on to be one of our more popular reads over the past past 18 months and it's had sort of a long tail and we think that this animation in the background and the dramatic title really draw readers in the second tip is to add a hero again this speaks to what I was saying earlier about character-driven stories incentivizing cooperation and donations this hero doesn't necessarily need to be a person it could also be a place we love seeing stories in which a low-key is kind of the protagonist but either way having sort of a hero to root for or an antagonist I guess to root against make stories much more sort of human and relatable and emotionally kind of I guess it makes readers more emotionally invested in the outcome of that story by the way I'm just going to scroll through some of these examples really quickly but this this is a new story this is an arc jeaious story map that I'm showing you here it's available in our gallery if you want to sort of go through it at your own speed and and check out some of these examples on your own the third tip is to give your story rhythm this isn't essential for all stories but it can be really helpful to sort of establish a consistent cadence within sections and between sections in your story we've found that this kind of rhythm provides comfort it gives readers a sense of what to expect and sometimes that's what they want again this isn't true for all stories in some cases you might kind of want to surprise your reader and have these sort of jarring transitions but in general this is something to think about if your content and your story is related maybe try and make it sort of use consistent sort of patterns and of presenting that information throughout your story yeah here's an example where we're just looking at income across a number of different American cities and we basically use the same model for the five or six different cities that we show and again this just makes it really easy for readers to kind of they'll read through the first couple and they'll say okay this is what it is I know what to expect I'm just gonna drill ahead to the city of that I'm most interested in the fourth tip is to create a little world and what I mean by this is to create or to establish kind of a consistent visual language throughout your story using consistent colors using consistent typefaces and type treatments and type sizes can really serve to reinforce reinforce for the narrative integrity of the story and also lends a certain degree of credibility to you as an author we've seen our fair share of stories that use like a million different shades of like hot pink and lime green and like all these different font sizes and they're certainly like a visual like punch in the face but once you look at the like the cover page chances are you're probably just gonna like close that tab before you have like a you know epileptic fit or something the fifth the fifth point that we want to make is one size doesn't fit all what we mean by this is to consider your audience before you create a story consider what kind of devices they'll be reading your story on if you're producing a story for sort of the general public keep in mind that a lot of people are reading their stories on phones and tablets these days so you might want to ensure that your story doesn't have too much really heavy bandwidth intensive content like 3d scenes and another sort of rich interactive media static maps might be more appropriate conversely if you're producing a story maybe for an agency and you know that it's going to be presented on a you know high-powered computer and that's the primary environment which is going to be shown and consumed then you know that maybe you can use larger resolution images and you can get a little bit more crazy with some of those dynamic or interactive components because you know that the audience is going to be consuming it in an environment that supports that kind of media the sixth tip think big and think small what we mean by this is alternating between large scale and small scale views Geographic views within your story and I think this kind of ties into the one about establishing rhythm it's really helpful and I think kind of engaging if you're maybe starting with the macroscale view of your story and then you're zooming into maybe a local case study and then maybe presenting sort of a regional context shifting these scales helps bring things into perspective helps provide more sort of broader geographic context and it also just keeps things fresh this story here which is about the environmental implications of beef consumption around the world demonstrates that through these maps so this is a global scale or small scale proportional symbol map of beef consumption but then we alternate to these really large scale satellite imagery views of individual cattle farms throughout the world number seven both active and passive maps or interact both static and interactive maps again I think this speaks to understanding your target audience but there are also different use cases for both kinds of maps if you really want to encourage your readers to explore the data naturally you're going to want to use an interactive map but if it's more important just to sort of present sort of a general trend in the data maybe an inner maybe a static map is more appropriate in that case and similarly if you're if you know that your readers are going to be primarily consuming this media on smaller devices or maybe areas with with less sort of internet bandwidth in those cases static maps are also probably a little bit more may be a better option just because they're less resource intensive number eight keep it short and sweet we know you're passionate about your work and your hobbies and your causes but that doesn't necessarily mean that your entire audience is just as passionate and while it can be tempting basically to pour your whole heart into a story and make it like you know a million pages long keep in mind that like remember that 37 second statistic that I said a minute ago yeah story maps are sticky but if you're basically putting a novel into your story map chances are most people aren't going to get all the way to the bottom before they either you know lose lose patience or get distracted or just kind of give up there are certainly cases where it can be appropriate to to produce a really long story especially if there's kind of a consistent rhythm or if it's maybe a tour or collection of different related points or places but for more sort of linear conventional journalism style story maps try to keep it really short and sweet and that will ensure that your audience gets all the way to the end and engages fully with with all of that content and number nine make a call to action assuming your readers have made it to the bottom of your story don't just leave them hanging give them something to do you can use this as an opportunity to solicit donations maybe for for your own organization if you're a non-profit or for a cause that you're really passionate about you could also use this to you know insert a button to link to external resources about about content relevant to your story basically by the time your readers have gotten to the end of theirs end of your story they're interested they're invested in that content you should really capitalize on that interest and and give them something to do so you might for those of you that saw the plenary or basically been here for the past few days you're probably well aware by now that we're introducing a totally new version of arc jeaious story maps a sathyas going to give you a great demo of that in just a minute but i quickly want to touch on some of the primary reasons that we decided to start from scratch and sort of rebuild story maps from the ground up again I'm going to give you a real high level overview here the first is that if you've created a story map in the past you know that there are six or seven different templates that you have to choose between once you commit to a template you're sort of locked into that and this can be really frustrating for a lot of authors who maybe commit to like a map journal only to realize a couple hours later that their story would actually be better served by as a cascade and they have to start from scratch so we're trying to sort of bypass that entire pain point entirely by presenting story maps as a single unified block based builder that brings the best of all these different templates into a single authoring environment allows you to mix and match different kinds of layouts like map journal and map tour and map series in a way that really allows you to create the story that you want and that you think will really resonate with your audience rather than sort of constraining you to these very sort of narrow focused templates second we think that great cartography is really central to story maps but one piece of feedback that we've received intermittently over the past few years is that it can be a little bit difficult to create really simple focus maps especially if you don't have a lot of GIS or cartography experience with that in mind we're introducing a new kind of feature called Express maps Express maps are interactive maps that you author directly in the story map builder they're really optimized for locators and other simple reference maps but there ought you can also them in just a matter of minutes they look really great they perform great and we hope that they serve as kind of a nice complement to web maps they're not intended to replace web maps entirely but rather work alongside them for more simple use cases a third we really just wanted our story maps to look very modern and feel very modern and fresh the oldest templates were designed in like 2012 and if you've used them recently you probably know that they look a little bit long in the tooth and they were long overdue for a complete makeover additionally we know that organisations have often have very rigorous branding requirements in terms of colors and fonts and logos and so we want to ensure that that you can create a beautiful story using our using our tool but that you can also sort of extend extend those Styles a little bit further to meet the branding requirements of your own organization fourth we really wanted to streamline the publishing and collaboration workflows of authoring a story map and so we're introducing this new draft this new draft state 4 or I guess draft an unpublished stories state for your stories Satya will show you what this actually looks like in practice in just a moment but one feature that we're really really excited about is autosave which essentially just alleviates a lot of the stress that comes with having to remember to click Save before like you're you know you lose internet or your browser crashes or whatever as a story map creator myself autosave is probably one of the features that I'm most excited about it's also one of the features that I think the least about and I think that's probably a good thing and finally we just wanted to leverage the latest web technologies to ensure that story maps are super performant across devices and in different environments so we're using I'm not a developer so I'm not even going to try and like tell you what we're doing but they they do perform much better than some of those classic apps especially in low bandwidth environments and we're putting a lot of thought into ensuring that that you don't need to have a super powerful computer or that you don't need to have like a giant you know 1440p monitor to get the most out of stories and because we just have a single unified builder when we do introduce new updates to the platform we don't need to push those out to seven different builders individually we just have a single product a single template now and so it'll be much easier for us to roll out small updates like hot fixes and patches we'll be able to deploy those with much greater frequency than we have been in the past but it'll also be easier for us to introduce new kinds of content blocks whether those are you know simple content blocks you know we already have photos and videos and images but we might add you know additional kinds of content blocks to the Builder based on based on your feedback in your demand because we just have one builder it's gonna be much much easier for us to do that moving forward so those are five quick reasons on why we're introducing this new or why we decided to build this new ArcGIS story Maps with that being said I'm gonna turn it over to Satya who's going to give you a little demo of the new builder thanks thanks Cooper so before we go ahead I just wanted to say if we love feedback and in this room the only way we can hear feedback is through your applause right so I'm gonna show you a lot of stuff here and the more feedback you give the more you can see how about that sounds good all right let's get going actually they're a bunch of products you might know a few of them so one two three quick capture but I'm here today to talk about story Maps all right we did release version of story maps let's get started right the we actually started on this some time back and we wanted to give this or release this at this user conference so we did that that's great so let me actually go through some of the features that you might have noticed or not and then I'll give you a demo of it single unified builder not going to talk more I think Cooper gave a great introduction block picker so that's one of the reasons why you actually went away from or one of the solutions to go away from different templates is we have now introduced blocks you can actually construct your story using blocks mix and match it's up to you there's different types of blocks and and more to come themes won't click themes I would say it's a designer in a box can a feature write beautifully designed you can expect a lot more Express Maps we're gonna see one and Cooper already talked about it we also give you amazing story cover options one of the tips was start your story with a bang and how do you do it is with different color options branding we have given you options to control color some options of fonts custom logo with the link more will be coming web maps and web scenes we love maps just like you guys do and we have not only embraced it we've actually made it better you can do a lot more things with it within the new story maps what else draft public workflow this is more in close to how you guys work you want to publish you want to make some changes take some time and republish again and we give you this option too it's like a holding pattern next is mobile optimized by for free or us as part of the product itself you don't have to do anything we try our best to deliver your stories in the best possible way to the end users around the world okay you just click you just author your story click a button publish and we will take care of the rest we'll make sure it's amazingly fast and available throughout the wall anywhere and we try all sorts of technical things behind the scenes embedding embedding web URLs is a very common thing in many stories and we have not only given you that but we have actually extended that a lot more we actually allow you to embed iframes there is any HTTP URLs but we also automatically give you smart cards and we also integrate about 500 popular services so I'll show you what that means in a short while sharing where we know you guys want to share stories we want it to go viral we want you to spread the word and actually tell great stories so we have enable sharing from the ground up so we have done everything possible behind the scenes we have we give you automatic Twitter cards Open Graph meta tags for Facebook and other sites we even have an OEM bred spec if you know what it is it's a it's an embeddable spec we even have some SEO built into each story that you create so that things like Google can crawl you and actually make it searchable right you don't have to do anything we just take care of these things for you accessibility is fully built in the entire product is accessible and we continue towards that the entire product is localized your the story you write is not localized but the actual product itself is localized so if you write a story in a different language everything will look in the same language and then we even support the right to left and many many more I can keep keep going rather than that let me actually shift gears and show you a demo since most of you know story maps I will not start from scratch but if you are not sure how to go how to get started you just go to story map storage Escom ok go to story map story are just calm there's a sign-in button 3 since when if you're paying attention let me just show it to you so you go to story maps Dargis calm and once you come here it's going to look something like this you can learn more if you click on the overview link you can learn more we have an amazing marketing and you know resources link you can actually learn a lot more about the product and what it does you can also take a look at some of the sample stories out there and some of the things that Cooper were showing was actually is actually available here and then the other thing is who can access story maps that's there was a question downstairs so I thought I'll just answer it here okay so if you got caught up in the internet thing let me just drag in alright if you actually go to storymap store just calm and if it loads you will be able to click on the login button and that in the login button you can enter your RJ's credentials the organizational account that you have that you use right now or or there you go or if you don't have an account and if you're just curious you can also either use a a public account that you have previously created or just create one just to test it out all right so it's easy to get started now that you know how to get started and you have actually heard all the the features let me show you once you log in it's going to go to my stories if you are a part of an organization that is you're not a public account then you do get this my organization tab and if I click on that I can see all the amazing stories my organization has produced right it's cool you can actually discover you can actually look at it but I'm interested in my story so I'm actually coming here so while Cooper was talking I was actually constructing this this story you can see it so I started this story I wanted to talk about the wonders of the world right by the way I'm not a storyteller but I'm trying to follow his steps so one of the tips he said was to start with the back and we told you if we've given you some options what are my options if you come and start a story this is the default option you can add an image or a video so let me show you so I can actually click on an image and then say ok I want to add an image so it's pretty easy you just select an image and then you actually get it and then you can actually place your panel anywhere you want you've even done some cool things like if you actually go to the image properties we also have something called as focal point this is this is important because when you are actually looking on a phone if you see there you have a phone preview what portrait and landscape sometimes the image don't get represented correctly so you might want to tell us which is more important so suppose I feel Taj Mahal is more important to me then I'll actually put point over there and we'll do our best to deliver that piece of that image perfectly on the device that you open if you can show everything I'm sure everything otherwise we'll do our best okay and then say suppose you want to change this then you can actually go to the design panel and then choose between the different options you can go very simple and say no I just want simple you know it's a simple text simple description I'm actually good or you can go out side by side view and say oh yeah actually I kind of like this this is a way or you can even even flip it if you want to or you can go with the default I kind of like this I'm gonna just keep this over here so I've started to actually put some text here it's pretty easy to add some text you can either start typing or we can actually click on the click on the plus button over here and you get a bunch of options you get many text options you get all the other options you can write a quote or you can even select some text and and change some sort of a formatting some of the things you expect from a text kind of editor now the next thing I want to add to this is I've started a story on Grand Canyon and then say for example I want to add a call to action like what Cooper was actually mentioning so how do I add a call to action I come here you can add it in many ways one of the ways you could do it is you can add a button in this button you can say okay follow us on Twitter so I want us I want them to follow us on Twitter so that they can actually get updates and actually follow us so how do I do that I actually do this and then go to Twitter for example so if I have a Twitter handle I can just copy that over here and then put it as a link and then I'm done so if somebody comes here and clicks it it'll just take them over there that's that's pretty cool so also I had a note over here to add a web map so how do I add a map or a web map over here it's actually pretty straightforward you just click plus and then you click on a map the first thing you're gonna see is it says that you do not have any map I have not created any map right I'm not a cartographer or anything I don't know how to create a map so it's fine I don't have a map so if you are a part of an organization you can just go to my organization or actually go to the living atlas that we provide and you can grab any map it so happens that for my demo here one of my colleagues have actually created a nice web map it a seven wonders of the world right that's pretty cool actually click on that I see the demo I actually see the map I'm pretty happy I can even make changes I can actually hide some layers or even change certain things change the extent maybe I just want to concentrate on this part of the world and then I'll say place the map and then I'm done right easy you could or you could have done web maps you could have also done web scenes just works the same way not only that we also do something some other things we also give you options to change the size of the map you can actually just make it wider fullscreen right sort of medium large and you could also just make it into a small float and if you do actually float it you can actually you know write some text over here right so this actually gives you a let me just copy this just for ease of it but you guys get the idea right you can actually type text here or copy anything over here and it would just float so these are some some of the nice things so we also talked about expose maps expose map is just like any other map I can change the size so I've started creating this Xpress map let me show you how it looks like so I click on edit and if you see here I already have two points so I've started the wonders of the world so first one was the Grand Canyon over here so I actually did that it has a nice image and some text I also started with you know one more over here but then I'm actually interested in adding one more so let me show you how to do that so here they say there's a locator I can actually find the other one that want to add in this case I want to add the Taj Mahal okay so it's going to come over here and I can clearly see that it is actually showing me the right place that's great so I can just add this to the map and because I actually searched and add this to the map just to save a few clicks we just add the title and everything ready for you to go so how do you add your image it's pretty simple you just click on add image and then you know pick a photo actually you're done it's as simple as that right so if I actually click on this right now you can you can actually see the pop up is already populated and this pop up will get represented in the in the phones and the tablets perfectly the way the way you want it okay so this is how you do but Express Maps is a lot more so one other cool thing that I can do is I can add some annotations so here it is I don't want anybody to click the pop-up I just want them to know where you know what it is so I can actually say that maja my favorite place or something like that right I can actually adjust the size move it around and even create a leader line how cool is that okay since you guys clever I'm going to show you one more thing okay all right the other cool thing you can do about this is we have something called as numbered points we always know we have points but how cool is numbered points you keep adding we keep increasing the number small convenience but it's actually pretty cool we saw there was a nice animation to alright the next you can draw lines you've all seen drawing lines so I'm going to first draw a line but then I'm gonna show you something really nice ok so first time I'm going to show you is you can actually make more segments that is cool but what you have actually not seeing is this or you guys ready all right okay you're you being nice to me so that's that I'll actually continue now now sis say I want to I want to actually point something so we also have an arrow right and as you expect these arrows are also bendable so can I have single arrows double arrows is up to you so the other thing is you can connect to do that next just to make it more interesting we can also trace any line you want the faster you trace the more straight of the line the slower you trace the more dense of the line okay then you can still bend it along and change it all right I mean there's a lot more to this I'm not gonna spend more time but if you don't like anything you can either press delete or just come to this trash bin over here and then drop it over there and it's gone okay so this is Express map for you you can also do things like change base maps and stuff like that I'll let you explore it say suppose I'm happy with this you just place the map then you're done and you have the same sizing options and the rest cool it's really getting fun now we get to the other side of it so we can actually add more thing he wanted to show you that having a rhythm having something changing it up so that people actually read your story sidecar is a great option I came I actually click the plus button right let me let me just show it to you and if I actually click the plus button over here you'll see an option to add a sidecar right so I just added that sidecar over here and I started one more wander over here I gave it a title I gave it an image now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add a video adding video is also pretty simple is if you have an mp4 it can just you know give the mp4 to us and then we'll upload it and we'll make sure it works on your device correctly and then there you go you can actually add a lot of value to these stories by just having these having these immersive video sections so you can add a map you can add a web scene you can add an image you can add a video can add any any of those things over there it's just an additional note for those one these videos are gonna play on mobile devices which is not the case in the classic templates cool an added bonus all right cool good I was about to stop all right let's let's continue so we do we do know that you can embed right so let me show you what are the different things you want to embed I'm actually talking about say Grand Canyon for example I can embed a website in this case I'll just go simple and copy a Wikipedia website I come here and I embed a website you could think of any any website in anything write your own website or GIS apps in any kind of website and then I click say see we are trying to figure out what kind of thing this is and you see a magically a card appears okay so this is the new web card or a smart card that we have now you might say oh this is great but I actually wanted the actual web site to be there I don't want it to be a card so we said okay that's fine okay you guys can do it too just click on this button and it becomes a real website you can actually embed a real website now if this website you can also actually resize it into a medium website or a large website and this was this was problems at websites sometimes it doesn't load right but that's just dependent on the internet but if it loads then you would actually see it so this is one other way of doing it and you might decide you know what it's actually just safe to just have a card over here the other kind of embed that you can have is any kind of social media embeds so might have Flickr Twitter Instagram Facebook Facebook video any kind of visa photo bar on 500 of them let me show you an example here there is a Twitter or a tweet right this is from the Grand Canyon account and I'm actually want to advertise this tweet say for example so what I do is I can just copy a new URL you don't have to worry just copy a URL and then you actually paste it over here and click Save so what we are doing is we are now analyzing what did you paste and then we figure out if the internet works that it is actually a tweet and because of that we will actually place this tweet correctly as a Twitter feed or it our actual tweet in your story for you automatically so this would work for any of the 500 so it could work for your videos Facebook posts or Instagram or any story anything right it will actually represent it correctly in your story over here it's pretty I think the Internet is not not cooperating today but you guys get the idea right so there's a lot of these things that you can do and these are all the things that we have done oh by the way this is still in the draft mode right I can always click click publish and when I actually click publish it'll ask you for the different options and the other thing that I could do is actually completely change the way this this app looks and feels so for example here I am I kind of like this but I might want to just choose a different theme so I go for a dark theme you guys see what happened the entire story changed right from font spacing colors of the math text background links every single thing changed if you if you're if you're impressed with PowerPoint just wait till you use this right so these are the options and then what our designers also did was we can I knew wanna customize so we kind of give you that hey with this design these three colors go well so I can actually change it so did you see completely changed or I could actually change this to this but you might say no our company has a very specific brand color and still use it okay you can still type in your own color but just saying the other thing you can do right now is actually pick between a few font pairings in the future we will increase this but this is coming okay the other thing that you can do is upload a custom logo what's gonna happen if you upload custom logo is for example let me just use this you see this custom logo comes over here so when you share the story the story Maps logo will not be there it will be your logo with the story and if somebody clicks on it it you might want to take it to your website or something like it's more of the branding options that we are giving okay so this was a quick tour please explore create your own stories okay are you guys happy good excited okay now are you guys ready to see what we are going to do next all right okay so the road ahead okay don't please don't take any pictures now first things first please read the top heading what does it say features you are working on and it's subject to change okay that doesn't mean we will not do it but just don't take it literally for the date that we are going to but I'm not gonna give you any dates but these are the things that we are working on okay we love Express Maps and we're gonna make it even more awesome okay since it's so awesome I'll not tell you what we're going to do but we'll I'll give you a hint we are actually working on data layers okay I'll leave it at that cool all right I know I didn't show you I'm not gonna show I'm not going to show you what what it looks like that's fine the next thing we are looking for map tours map tours is coming to the next generation it'll be more awesome and much much very different and awesome than than what you've seen so far we know we also have to work on simple things like SMAP swipe and some other some other enhancements and we're working on that we are continuously working on mobile enhancements it already looks amazing on your phone you should try one of the stories that's out there but we are even going further and you'll see what in a second we are also introducing a brand new horizontal layout so you saw me scrolling up and down right now you can actually swipe left and right - we are not giving a competition - tinder however we will for presentations like pro powerpoints okay you will be definitely able to go horizontal or vertical it's up to you and then we are actually working on a cool thing called collections if you have ever you to map series how many of you have used map series here some of you however wished you had a better bookmarking solution using story maps yes oh we heard you we are introducing a brand new and very exciting concept called collections and I'll give you a sneak peek pretty soon and then we are also working on themes like what Cooper said ok you guys ready to see something yes [Applause] all right let's see the first thing is this is how the next generation map tour might look like ok it's gonna be awesome building it will be a breeze and it's going to look great and work great on your phones ok in fact you will want to build a map too just because it looks good how about that next this is an early concept of a map swipe this is how potentially you could be adding and comparing two layers within a map or two Maps okay it's just a rendering but you guys get the idea this is going to be there too you know a couple of you liked it but that's good don't feel shy it's okay alright mobile enhancements most of it is already there but you just see the attention to detail here here we go this is especially useful when we introduce map tours because in map tours you have a map and you have points on a map but you also have photos right so you want a great experience on a phone that is what we're actually working on next is something brand-new you have never seen before in story maps but you already talked about it next is the horizontal layers you will be able to tell stories which actually look like slides right and the best part about it is this is not a template this is just part of your blocks so you can just have a story with a horizontal layout or you can actually have a vertical story with a horizontal block in it are you guys getting it it's up to you so more options okay so the next thing we are going to introduce is collections as you can see here's a collection here's a landing page for a collection here are the things and then you go into the presentation mode there we go beautiful collection of websites web URLs images videos stories anything you want okay so we think this was pretty big you can actually have collections and each collection can have a topic and each topic can have your thing this is great for if you have a lot of stories and you want to sort of you know group it based on a theme or group it based on a topic right this is going to be amazing you can put it on your web sites this could be your resume this could be your portfolio I can't imagine what you guys will do with this but you guys get the idea by the way it's all included no extra charge yeah apart from this we are also working on new themes and I want to go details but you're gonna get a lot of cool ways so we're gonna give you some team's amazing themes that our designers have done and you can customize a little bit on that but before you ask we are thinking about giving you fully customized themes too but it's coming it's not it's not in our current roadmap but it's coming so just wait for it and then since you've been since you've been a great audience I can also tell you that we will do all of this by the end of this year how about that okay so I am planning to have three more releases after this but it doesn't matter how many releases we have by the end of this year we are planning to have everything done I mean the things that we've shown but means that we have a lot more things to come okay so join us in the next conference to see the next set of things that's going to come thank you everyone and I'm gonna pass it back to Cooper who's gonna take it from here thanks Satya I hope you enjoyed that nice little demo a couple sort of housekeeping things that we want to mention as some of you may be familiar with the storytelling with maps competition from years past we're doing that again this year but it's a little bit different and it's called the story map or the year competition and instead of evaluating the entries just on the basis of the story themselves we're also going to ask you to propose a project that you can do in your community and there's a $5,000 grand prize but we expect you to actually apply that $5,000 toward that community project and lastly we ask that you provide feedback on our presentation if you enjoyed it let us know this helps us know what works and what doesn't work and I think that's it we'd like to open it up for some questions now thanks for sticking around [Applause] yeah [Music] correct that's a good question we've been pretty open about it and you can share it again so we have no plans to either take away the old story maps or we don't even want to call it the old story maps right because it's a very popular product you guys love it and we call it a classic so that we can differentiate the version so the idea is that we are not building any export tool convert tool any of that your stories are great it'll continue to work you can keep editing it ok so what we want you to do is in parallel start using this new product and slowly transition into this new product for your new stories we ask that if you are going to create your stories please take a look at this first and if it the only if it doesn't fit your bill you need to go back and use the classic and over time I said hopefully by December you will have everything you need and more - absolutely use this as your next generation storytelling - so because we don't want to take away the old one or are actually just sunset its own we are not going to have any we're not gonna force you anything we want to build a product that's so great that you yourself will use it right so that is the idea so we're not going to actually ask anything to be Auto converted Auto copy it's a copy and paste so you can copy from here to that if you want to but just option you don't have to correct right if you want to recreate the new story you can reuse your web Maps the web scenes you can reuse your images that you have created all those things and the text also can be reused it's just a manual copy and process and it's pretty simple to do our editorial team a big kudos to them they've been using this product for about eight years now and they have transferred if not all at least half their stories to the new story maps and it's been a pretty painless process for that so we have observed how they've done it and they write very complex stories very large stories and they've been pretty happy with it so it's a pretty seamless experience I would say any other questions all right will you be able to drive a collection with the feature service just wait for our update on collections you will you'll be surprised what we have yes perfect can I make my sharing yes you can actually publish to everyone or to your organization and very soon will also be exposing to groups ok within your organization does that answer your question yes yes because and we have some customer demanding the ability of my singlet right correct so we're collecting feedback on fully custom themes we have an amazing set of designers we've only exposed two themes but I'll tell you there's a lot to come you'll be surprised so our first goal is to cover the 90% use case which is switch between themes and customize a little bit and then we are going to work on because we have a good theme specification now we have come up with a theme specification and we know how to create those themes the work that is remaining to expose it to you for fully customized themes is to build a interface for it so that you guys can actually enter some values and also there's a lot of legalities in fonts so we're still working through that because we cannot host your fonts because there's some legal issues around that if that's not the case what is the free fonts and some of the free fonts doesn't work in all languages I mean there's a lot of things that we need to think about but apart from that there's not I mean it's just a matter of time so hopefully the next time I meet you in any of the conference I can actually give you better news right yes any other question yes so you're telling to build a map tour you mean right correct when the map tour feature gets introduced we will definitely consider the ease of importing photos and if the photo has any geotagged information we will definitely take that into account we will also take into account any feature service that you have that might already have some attachments all those all those use cases are being considered for the for the map tour feature yes correct so collection itself is a single level nesting a collection will have a bunch of items correct and technically we don't want you to but technically you could put a collection inside a collection though you know it might be interesting but it's up to you right she can't prevent you but I'm just saying then we'll have to add my tenth tip in his storytelling tips saying that do not put things inside things like yes yes what would you do with the short list we are definitely looking into how to incorporate some of the features it have so in terms of classic and how what features it has and what kind of thing and the in the in the next-generation story maps what we are looking in terms of a transition or equivalency is what are the kinds of stories that you can tell using classic right you will be able to tell similar stories or the same kind of stories and more using the next generation it might not be called the same it might not have the same button the same you know text and the same kind of look and feel but ultimately when you when you recreate it or when you create a new story you will have the same set of capabilities and more to tell your stories that is how we are actually progressing behind the scenes so what that means is we might take journal and cascade and fold it into one and give you a linear view with all the features in it we might actually say maybe this was not even needed maybe it was a mistake we did this so we wanted to eliminate that and actually move to a different set of things so all those things are being discussed behind the scenes so all the things that you have in shortlist will most probably be accommodated in different ways using the using the new story maps so it won't be called shortlist or anything lobby blocks in in the future any other question you can ask one they are part of the story that is actually a story it's just a list of facilities you can you can bring any type of app into into storymap using the embed right you can build exactly what you want right in an experienced builder web app builder or any other builder it doesn't matter get the URL embedded within a story map but story map cannot be I mean story map sees its own product it's going to live by itself any other question cool are you guys excited we are excited thank you for using it please continue and let us know feedback actually I forgot to mention there is a direct feedback in the product do you have a oh you have any screen that's correct if you actually log into the product there's a direct feedback link that we have done okay and that actually directly comes to me and a few other colleagues so if you don't want to go to support I mean don't ask support questions please we will not get back to you but if you if you actually have a specific direct feedback that we have not addressed or you think will be a good thing to address if you can click on that and actually give us a great rating and then continue on by telling us what you need and please be very specific and give us enough information and also if there is any screenshots or a video that you want to attach so that we can take a look at it maybe you find some other side that does it and we want something like this and also if it will be great if you can give us your email so that we can get back to you and have a conversation or we might set up an online meeting to to understand more if you want to engage at engage us at that level please reach out to this right if you have any product level questions how to do this how to do that we have four arms we have support we have Twitter all that kind of stuff okay if you want to talk to me or you want to back from us and you want to set up a a meeting then this is a great way for you to get back to us we're looking for good feedback anything that we might have missed anything that is cool out there that we don't know about please let us know and we'll be happy to look into alright thank you thank you for your time [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Esri Events

Views: 4,090

Rating: 4.8095236 out of 5

Keywords: Esri, ArcGIS, GIS, Esri Events, Geographic Information System, Technical Workshop, UC, ArcGIS StoryMaps, StoyMaps, spatial information, data visualization

Id: sVHmptWMo_U

Length: 58min 42sec (3522 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 31 2019