Your Popup Can Do More Than You Think
Most popups are just a list of field names and values. Everything is technically there, but almost none of it is easy to read at a glance, and none of it tells you what is actually happening in a neighborhood. For my Boston GeoEquity project, I wanted my census block groups to do more than list their attributes. I wanted them to tell a story.
The finished popup has collapsible sections, a pie chart, and comparison bars. You can explore it live in the StoryMap.
So I rebuilt the popup from the ground up. It now behaves more like a small dashboard than a traditional popup, with collapsible sections, a pie chart, and comparison bars that measure each block group against Boston citywide averages, all anchored by an Equity Index that blends income, poverty, unemployment, education, housing affordability, and access to parks and transit into a single score. I built it piece by piece, mostly by describing what I wanted to Claude in natural language and iterating on the Arcade until it was polished to my liking. I walk through the full process in the StoryMap below, including a few tips to help you skip the tricky spots.
Read the full story here: Your Popup Can Do More Than You Think Storymap
Happy mapping 🌎,
Christine
