Beta Tester Guide

MapStory Beta Testers Guide

Thanks for taking time to test the MapStory.org beta release! This guide can be used as a reference to help you test with efficiency and productivity. Depending on the complexity of the data you’re testing with, or the mapstory you aim to tell, testing should be able to be completed in an hour or less.

Quick Background

MapStory is a platform with four main purposes:

1. Collecting spatio-temporal data ("StoryLayers")
2. Curating these StoryLayers for completeness and accuracy
3. Composing "MapStories" that use StoryLayers and other types of information, and
4. Conveying all this content quickly and easily for a global audience.

We've broken up the testing into these sections so you can target testing at the tasks you're most interested in.

Before you start testing, do these 3 things:

1. Get acquainted with the MapStory vision by watching the Get Started videos. You'll especially want to focus on the ones for importing data, editing StoryLayers and composing MapStories.
2. Review the feature specifications that drove the MapStory Beta development
3. Make sure you have a dataset to use and a MapStory you want to tell for your testing. If you don't have these, we have exemplars available in a DropBox. For Tester Data, click here. For recipes to make a MapStory, as well as the layer data required, click here.

Once you’re ready to test:

1. Open one of the surveys, follow its prompts, and enter your answers. All testing will be done on the mapstory.org site

   • If this is your first time testing, you should start with this survey focused on account creation. After completing this, you'll be able to move on to the other testing areas.
   • To test collecting StoryLayers, use this survey.
   • To test the curating StoryLayers use this survey
   • To test composing MapStories, use this survey
   • To test conveying content, use this survey

2. As you complete the survey, feel free to submit “Feedback” tickets with our UserSnap tool to explain any problems you encounter in a more visual way. Just click “feedback” button at the bottom right of any page on mapstory.org. Watch this video for more information.

3. If you feel comfortable, go further and report bugs or feature ideas directly into our Github repository. Remember to follow our guidelines for creating bug reports or feature requests in Github.

4. Check in anytime with the progress of our development team on our ZenHub.