Shortlist business addresses using suite numbers

[JayHodny]

Hi.  I am creating a Story Map using the Shortlist builder.  The csv file contains ~200 businesses around town, and are placed in TAB_NAME, as categories of Eat, Shop or Enjoy.  I have a few locations, where there are multiple businesses housed in a single building.  The street address is the same for each, with a suite number to differentiate between the businesses.  Is there a way to differentiate between these businesses in the web map app?  When I click on a map pin at a location I know has multiple businesses, the tab pane only opens the 'latest' one available.  If I search the Eat tab locations, for example, I can see there are multiple businesses at that location (mouse hover over each changes the pin information on the map).  If I click on the pin, it opens the 'latest' tab pane for that business.  I am hoping someone has a nice solution, as I want my business owners to be happy!  Many thanks in advance.

[RupertEssinger · Accepted solution]

Hi Jay

Thanks for raising this issue/question in the forum.

Shortlist doesn't offer a clustering option for the symbols, like the clustering you'll find in Story Map Crowdsource. Sorry about this limitation. Several authors have asked us to add that option to better handle having multiple places of interest at the same location. Like you describe, you can see all the places in the tab next to the map, but just by looking at the map it isn't obvious that there are multiple places there, and clicking on that location only opens up the top-most place.

There's not a great workaround for this: in addition to places for each individual business you could add a place into the Shortlist to represent the building itself, and list all the individual businesses that it contains in its description, and then order the places so that that one is top of the stack in the order. Or you could have one tab in the Shortlist for each building and another tab for all the businesses, so end users can choose what they see,  

We would like to offer a clustering option but this will most likely be down the road as we are first focussing on a new look and functionality for map tours.

Rupert

[JayHodny]

Hi Rupert,

Many thanks for the reply and the potential workarounds.  I have toyed with the idea of tweaking the latitude and longitude of each business located in the same building, as a way to "pull apart" the symbology so that the user can see there are multiple businesses at one street address.   This would be a little more work to manage and keep track of the manually edited lats and longs, but it might work.

Sincerely,

Jay

[RupertEssinger]

Hi Jay

Oops I should have mentioned that as another workaround: if your places are at the same location, you could move them apart a bit. However the efficacy of that depends on the scale your users will see the Shortlist at: The points will still be clumped together at small scales but at least this way when people zoom in they will see some separation.

Rupert