Recommendations for story map development#
Develop story maps with 15 to 20 steps.
Craft your title to be intriguing and descriptive.
Begin with an introductory paragraph that summarizes the story and its conclusion. Try to include basic answers to the questions of “why, who, what, when, where.” The reader should have a good idea of what took place after reading this paragraph.
Provide more details in the following paragraphs, elaborating on the brief information in the first paragraph.
Catch the audience’s interest: use maps, images, key figures etc.
Make sure the maps you use show quality data, have appropriate styling and complete metadata.
Make your titles and subtitles active, engaging, and concise.
Personalize your story: add pictures, citations, interviews, videos etc.
Give proper citation to maps, quotes and media used in the story map.
Write short paragraphs - try to keep them under 100 words.
Adapt the amount of text depending on its end-use: more text would be fine for online reading where less text would be appropriate if you plan to use this as a presentation.
Give a voice to your story: call to action at the end of your story map if necessary
Add a last step containing credits, contacts, organization logos, and if necessary, links to relevant external resources.
Test your story map on different screen sizes and different devices (computer, tablet, smartphone): what looks great on one screen doesn’t necessarily look great on another. This is particularly true between computer screens and mobile phones.
Ensure that media loads quickly. For instance, it may take several seconds or even several minutes to load a 10MB image depending on the users internet connection. We recommend using photos with a file size less than 1MB.