Storymap

Storymap now helps when a save fails, on a phone as much as a desktop.

• You can now remove a single change that can never save, so the good changes queued behind it get through instead of being discarded together.
• A failing save now offers a Copy debug info button, so you can paste the details into a chat and diagnose it without developer tools.

Today went on a caching bug that hid saved changes from signed-in editors.

• When you save changes to a board, you now see them straight away, instead of an old copy your browser had held onto for up to four hours.

An automated check that compared storymap’s design mockups against the live app was removed, because it kept reporting differences that were never real.

A small correction to how plans get tied back to their backlog items.

• Fixed the plan-to-item linker so it uses the right file path when run from a separate working copy, where before it could point at the wrong place.

Storymap now records its own internal steps in more detail, so a slow or failing request can be traced to the operation behind it.

Storymap got a nudge to where it opens and a fix that protects work you haven’t saved yet.

• Opening storymap now takes you straight to the Planner board, instead of the general workspace board it showed before.
• Saving no longer fails when you close an item then reopen it before saving, which used to leave your edits stuck and unrecoverable.

Two user-flagged interface problems, plus storymap’s share of the workspace tracing rollout.

• The coloured dot beside each project name is gone, since it said nothing the name beside it didn’t.
• Behind the scenes the board joined the workspace tracing rollout, so a slow save or snapshot now shows where the time went.
• The plan for rolling tracing and analytics across every app in the workspace was written down and sequenced.
• Fixed the loading placeholder, which collapsed into thin slivers on desktop and stacked vertically on mobile instead of looking like the board.

A storymap had been silently refusing everything you tried to add to it.

• You can now add a task, slice or activity to a map again, after a bug quietly rejected every one of those.
• Setting up a new storymap works again too, blocked by the same bug until now.

The story-mapping tool carried a leftover check that kept failing because the file it read was deleted weeks earlier, so it has now been removed.

On a wide board you’ve scrolled sideways, the three-dot menu on a slice now opens on screen, so the button works instead of doing nothing.

Most of the work went into how a story map looks on a phone.

• On a phone, each slice now sits as a full-width heading above its cards, freeing the screen space the old frozen left column used.
• Story cards are bigger on a phone, showing two across with a third peeking to signal you can scroll for more.
• Fixed a mobile slice heading that scrolled out of view sideways, and task names that sat above the centre of their row.

The storymap board now gives each card a short code you can quote when you talk about it, instead of its full ten-character id.

The story map’s grid got a little tidier.

• A column now doubles in width once a slice holds two cards, not three, so those cards have more room to read.
• Fixed the drag handle and menu icons on the map’s headers, which could sit above centre in rows of uneven height.

Most of the work went into the map editor.

• If you edit a map you can’t save, you can now discard those edits in one click instead of reloading the whole page.
• Fixed handles and menus too small to tap, unreliable task drops between two activities, and an error when editing a card just after closing it.

Most of the work went into dragging items around the map, with a fix for cards on phones.

• You can now drop a dragged slice, activity or task anywhere along its row or column, so it lands where you meant to put it.
• A full-length line with a plus marker now shows exactly where a dragged item will land before you let go.
• Fixed mobile item cards so tags no longer get cut off and cards line up evenly down the column.

Storymap opened its boards to signed-out visitors, and got easier to rearrange.

• You can now open a board marked public without signing in, so showing your story map to someone is just a link.
• You can now drag slices, activities and tasks by their handle to reorder them, or move a task into another activity’s column.
• When your session has expired, a sign-in link now appears in the footer, so you can get back to editing without hunting for it.
• Fixed a new-card form that kept the last cell’s details, board edits taking up to twelve hours to reach viewers, and sluggish card dragging.

Most of the work went into the story map board, on speed and on editing.

• Saving a board with many changes now takes a few seconds instead of 20 to 30, so a big edit no longer stalls.
• Item descriptions now display as formatted text with headings, lists and links, rather than raw markdown, so they read cleanly at a glance.
• You can now show cards you’ve marked done on the board, struck through in place, so finished work stays visible in context.
• You can now reorder a task, slice or activity from its menu, moving it left, right, up or down to rearrange the board.
• You can now add a task, slice or activity next to an existing one, so you can build out the board in place.
• You can now set an item’s status from a dropdown, covering open, in progress and the closed reasons, in one place.
• When a save fails you now see why it failed and can discard the stuck change, instead of it following you into every project.
• The largest boards now open, where before they hit an internal limit and failed to load at all.
• Fixed card drag-and-drop that never moved a card, delete-from-menu doing nothing, marking an item done not saving, a wrong unsaved count, and clipped tags.

The story map turned into something you rearrange and edit in the browser, rather than only read.

• You can now move a card to another cell by dragging it, or by tapping a destination, instead of editing files by hand.
• You can now change a card’s task and slice from its detail panel, where those fields were previously read-only.
• You can now close an item and record the outcome as done, won’t do, or duplicate, so the board shows how each item ended.
• Fixed map menus opening the wrong panel, cards vanishing after saving, misaligned columns, titles cramped to one word per line, and a duplicate close button.

Storymap maps a project’s backlog as a grid of activities, tasks and slices, and its whole interface has been rebuilt to a new design.

• You can now delete an item, or a whole activity with its tasks and items at once, so scrapped work leaves the map cleanly.
• An item can now show that it’s in progress, not just open or closed, so you can see at a glance what’s underway.
• An item can now link out to its design files, alongside the plan links it already carried.
• A brand-new, empty project now shows an Initialise action to create its first story map.
• You can now see which account you’re signed in as, and sign out, from the settings page.
• You can now rename or delete a tag across every item at once, so a tag change isn’t an edit to each item.

The design mock-up files that every screen of the app is built against finished a long clean-up.

Every visual value in them, from colours to spacing, is now verified by script rather than by eye. The checks caught real faults, including mobile layout rules that had never fired, so the mock-ups now display correctly on a phone.

The next version of the story-mapping screen is being worked out as mock-ups, before any of it gets built.

Storymap is a tool for laying work out as a map of activities and slices, and it came together into something you can use.

• You can see a project’s work as a grid of activities and slices, so its whole shape is visible at once.
• You can switch between projects from the top bar, each keeping its own map and archive.
• You can add an item and set its task, slice, effort and tags, so it lands in the right place on the map.
• You can open any item to edit its title, notes and details, with your changes kept as you go.
• You can drag an item from one cell to another to regroup it, and the map updates straight away without a reload.
• You can close an item as done, won’t do or a duplicate, and it moves off the map into the archive.
• You can browse everything you’ve closed in a separate archive, filtered by how each item ended.
• You can save several edits together, and if the same item changed elsewhere, a panel walks you through merging the two versions.
• Fixed a map that loaded with no items, modal buttons that stacked as two competing options on phones, and several mislabelled buttons and options.

Storymap’s whole design got worked out, from the screens and visual style to the technical plan behind them.