Better customization options Collections theme page

[ShaunKirby]

Because I use Story Maps Collections as a digital magazine for our program, I'd like to see better customization tools like those you would find on a digital magazine like Smithsonian or Scientific American. A few examples:

• Place to upload and organize more prominent digital cover image in tandem with other magazine cover content currently available for display. Cover images are often what draws a reader to content, just as individual StoryMaps are anchored by that first scrolling story image or video. Why not add the same capability to an overarching collection? 
• Ability to insert and organize key buttons such as "subscribe" and buttons based on themes. For example, our program supports marine research. It would be great to access current and archived Story Map pieces via the Collections Theme page based on buttons such as "Marine Life," "Sensing," and "Visualization." Such organization would make it easier for readers to navigate the breadth of research our program supports. 
• Ability to access past editions of StoryMaps Collections via buttons or Image Cards. For those of us using StoryMaps for science communication pieces over a long period of time, being able to access prior collections will make it easier for readers to understand research progress and programmatic work over time. 

My apologies for the length, and thank you to the StoryMaps team for all your hard work. Consistently implementing improvements can't be easy, and your team is the most responsive to its community that I have ever experienced in web publications. Great job!

[OwenGeo]

@ShaunKirby Thanks for this great feedback! You have shared some interesting ideas here for us to think about!

• For your 3rd item, a few weeks ago we released an enhancement to collections that lets you add a longer description to the overview page that can include links. This was in response to other similar feedback where authors were requesting the ability to link readers to other pages or resources. You can read more about this new capability here: What's New in ArcGIS StoryMaps (March 2023) (esri.com)
• For your 2nd item, could you provide a little more information about this? Where would you want to insert these buttons within the collection? (Could the collection description with links I mentioned above also meet this need?)
• For the 1st item, we are thinking about some different cover or overview page designs, so we'll make sure to add your feedback to our system to incorporate your ideas.

One final thought I wanted to share. We love that you enjoy using collections to organize your content! However, considering all your feedback together makes me think that you may have outgrown collections...

While we are still planning and considering enhancements to collections, we are also committed to keeping the collections user experience very simple. If you are managing a digital magazine, you may want to consider using a different tool to organize and present your content. An ArcGIS Hub site, for example, would provide a lot more layout capabilities and the ability to add and easily link between separate pages for past years' content or different categories of content. You could still use collections to organize and share sets of stories, but then those collections could be presented from a Hub page that would provide the more advanced layout and organization capabilities that it sounds like you are looking for to arrange and share a large set of content that will be expanding over time.

Let me know what you think!

[ShaunKirby]

Hi Owen, 

Awesome, thank you for the feedback. I'll take each of your responses in turn: 

• For your 3rd item, a few weeks ago we released an enhancement to collections that lets you add a longer description to the overview page that can include links. This was in response to other similar feedback where authors were requesting the ability to link readers to other pages or resources. You can read more about this new capability here...Same as below, I could use the longer description to link to our hub site.

• For your 2nd item, could you provide a little more information about this? Where would you want to insert these buttons within the collection? (Could the collection description with links I mentioned above also meet this need?) Yes, you're right here, the longer description with links can satisfy this function!
• For the 1st item, we are thinking about some different cover or overview page designs, so we'll make sure to add your feedback to our system to incorporate your ideas. Great! I look forward to seeing what you come up with. 

Creating a hub website is exactly what I was looking for with my previous comments. I'm relatively new to ArcGIS, so am still learning my way around its capabilities. Thank you for pointing this option out! I definitely plan on building a Hub site for our digital sci comm content made via StoryMaps. Something like this is akin to what I'd like to do. Do you know of any upcoming webinars to learn more about ArcGIS Hub capabilities? I plan on reading through the tutorials. Thank you greatly again!

[KevinBodrogi]

These are all fantastic ideas! I think allowing more customization will only make story map collection sites stand out more! I think the options of different cover pages would be good because right now we only have 3 options on the Collections site. Piggy backing off your post, I think having the ability to customize the Tile titles would really beneficial as well. Perhaps allowing the size, color, placement, or being able to add a mask or some type of rectangle behind the text to make it stand out would be good ideas. And making the logo larger!

Thank you for all the hard work creating these tools!

[OwenGeo]

@KevinBodrogi - Thanks for sharing your feedback.

You can already edit the item titles. Just click the gear on any of the items and you'll see a screen like this...

In a few weeks, we'll be adding the Summary field to this screen so you can modify those if you are using Journal layout.

[KevinBodrogi]

Hi Owen,

Thank you for the quick response. I know we can change the title's text but we were hoping to change the color of the text, and placement (top or bottom of tile) too! If you add an image with a light background, the white text blends in and becomes hard to read. Unfortunately, the text color does not change based on theme either. 

Great news about the summary! We almost went with that layout but really liked the magazine style.