The stories you create with ArcGIS StoryMaps are, for the most part, linear narrative experiences. But just because these stories generally have a straightforward structure doesn’t mean that they can’t include short detours—especially if those detours add value to interested readers.
Map actions allow you to enrich your stories with optional map interactions. Map actions are configurable toggle buttons or links that you can add to any sidecar slide that contains a web map, web scene, or express map. When readers select a map action, the appearance of the map changes.
In the example above, map actions are used to simultaneously change the map’s extent and toggle the visibility of different layers.
Map actions are treated as secondary content in a story—in other words, readers aren’t required to interact with them in order to progress. Because of this, map actions are best suited for map views that aren’t essential to the narrative, but that still add valuable context or information. Here are just a few of the many ways you can use map actions to enhance your sidecar slides:
Highlight an area of interest
You can use map actions to pan and zoom the map to key locations, such as study areas, points of interest, or outliers in your mapped data. These kinds of actions are useful for highlighting specific examples of broader geographic trends and relationships. This kind of map action is especially useful for express maps, which don’t support toggling layers on and off.
Filter map data
Because map actions can be used to toggle the visibility of different map layers, they are great for providing filtered views of large datasets. These filters can be geographic, thematic, or temporal in nature: For example, you might include actions that only show features that meet some statistical criteria (e.g., an attribute exceeds a certain threshold).
Show change over time
If you have several years of data to display, you can use map actions to isolate different time periods on the map. For example, if the initial view of your map shows car crashes between 2016 and 2019, you could include four actions—one for each year of the data. This approach can be far more economical than including a separate slide for each time period shown on the map.
Provide a fresh perspective
If your map concerns both the built environment and the natural world, you might include an action to toggle between a human geography-focused vector basemap and a world imagery basemap. Just add both basemap layers to your web map or web scene using the map viewer or scene viewer—or move any existing basemap layers out of the basemap group, so that they can be switched on and off—and then use the map action layer visibility controls to show one and hide the other. Providing two complementary views of the same geographic area can reveal interesting, and sometimes surprising, patterns.
In this example, map actions are used to zoom to geographic regions relevant to the map. Read the full story here.
Map actions open new doors for creative and effective storytelling, and we’re excited to see how you put them to use. To see some map actions in, well, action, take a look at our covid-19, World Heritage in Danger, or Urban Africa stories.
Configuring map actions
Map actions come in two flavors: Button-style actions and link-style actions. The two types of actions look slightly different: Button actions are large, full-width buttons, whereas link actions appear as underlined paragraph or large paragraph text with a special icon. But they behave the same: Selecting either a button- or a link-style map action will activate that action and change the appearance of the map; selecting that same action again will restore the map to its initial state.
Both kinds of map actions are quick to add and configure. In order to create either kind of action, you must first place a web map, web scene, or express map in the media panel of a sidecar slide. At that point, the Map action option will be enabled in both the block palette (for button actions) and the text formatting toolbar (for link actions).
Button-style actions
Selecting Map action in the block palette will insert a new button-style action into your story. Since the button hasn’t been configured yet, clicking it will simply restore the map to its original view. (These are called reset actions.) To configure the action to show something other than the map’s initial state, hover on the action and click Edit (pencil) in the toolbar that appears above it.
Above: Configuring a button-style map action in 30 seconds.
This will open the map designer. You can now adjust the appearance of the map for that action. Remember, your map will only be shown in this state when a reader activates the action; otherwise, it will be shown as it appeared when you originally configured it in the media panel.
When you’re satisfied with the appearance of the map, click Save action. This will return to the inline builder, and your newly configured action will be active. To deactivate the action, click it again. Or, if you’ve already inserted a reset action (denoted by the arrow within the action), you can select that to restore the map to its initial state.
Link-style actions
To create a link-style action, highlight a passage of text in a paragraph or large paragraph block, and select Map action (lightning bolt icon) in the text formatting toolbar. This will convert that passage into an action, and automatically open the map designer, where you can adjust the appearance of the map. Select Save action to apply this map configuration to your action.
If you need to adjust the map’s appearance, hover or tap on the map action link and select Edit (pencil icon). To delete the action, click Unlink (broken chainlink) instead.
Above: Configuring link-style map actions in a sidecar slide
Making the most of map actions
Much like mayonnaise on a sandwich, map actions are most effective when used judiciously. There is no hard limit to the number of actions you can add to a story, but the more that you add to a single slide, the less likely readers are to interact with them. That said, map actions work well in groups, and you shouldn’t shy away from bundling several related actions together, as shown in the examples above.
As a general rule of thumb, if you want to show information that’s crucial to your story, you shouldn’t hide it in a map action. But if you just want to enrich your narrative with supplemental map views, map actions are a great choice. As we continue to refine and expand the feature, we’d love to hear your suggestions for improvement.
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