Sudden change in scale/pan occurs on first click of certain tabs in Map Series

[AmyRoust]

I have a tabbed map series story map set up to show various districts with elected officials in our county. It has 8 tabs, and the tabs each point to a different ArcGIS online map, all of which have the same default extent set up in its settings. I've also added in that default extent to the story map application settings. The extent of the map for tabs 2-8 inherit from the first tab. Here's my issue: when you click on any of the last three tabs (Kansas Senate, US House, Township), the map appears to quickly zoom out, zoom in, and pan from west to east. It only happens the first time that you click the tab. Every subsequent time, the scale stays the same. The sudden zoom-pan behavior is disorienting and unnecessary. Has anyone experienced this issue? Any suggestions on what I could do to stop it?

[OwenGeo · Accepted solution]

Hi Amy,

Sorry you are having that issue with your story map. In this situation, I'd recommend making a single web map with all the layers you want to show in your story as opposed to using a different map for each section. See this article for how to do this and some reasons why this will likely provide a better experience for your readers:

ArcWatch | Less Can Be More 

Let me know if you have any questions.

Owen

[OwenGeo]

Amy -- One other suggestion I might make would be to consider adding your ortho imagery layer on top of one of the Esri basemaps like the light gray canvas basemap (rather than using the imagery as the basemap itself) to provide a little more context and fill in the rest of the main stage.

Since you want your readers to focus on the Douglas County area you can increase the transparency on the basemap to de-emphasize it a bit, if needed.

Hope this is helpful!

Owen

[AmyRoust]

Owen, thank you so much for both suggestions! I didn't know that the option existed to select a subset of layers from a single map to display. It took me about an hour to migrate everything into one map, which was worth the effort because I have far fewer maps to maintain. Even better, the sudden zoom/pan issue is gone now that I'm using one map. A win-win.

I agree with your suggestion to add context to the map, but I am limited at the moment because all of my web services are projected in state plane. In the near future, I intend to reproject everything to Web Mercator and use the AGOL standard caching extents so that we can take full advantage of the resources available. The days of the floating county motif are numbered!

Again, thank you for for your feedback! It was very helpful.