Week 11 Reflection

StoryMaps was super interesting and fun to use! It is very intuitive, I would compare it to PowerPoint in that it seems like a program you can do a lot with but one that beginners can easily find their way around. As such I would feel very confident helping someone use its features to build a presentation or whatever else. It offers a lot of nice affordances, such as a fluid way to integrate text, images, and especially maps. Nonetheless, there were some limitations. For example, it seemed hard to set images to custom aspect ratios or crop them in certain ways. Moreover, this is a niche use, but at first I had hoped to create an express or tour map, but rather than having the base be a map of Earth, I wanted to upload a custom map of the fantasy world I was designing my project off of. I could not find a way to do so. Accessibility wise, the image sizing could present a problem, along with text sizing and the lack of individual captions on images in a gallery. It seems like the best StoryMaps have a consistentform and theme, while also utilizing the mapping/zoom features of the program to engage an audience. The best also take advantage of multimedia tools. All in all, StoryMaps seems pretty chill.