What is Story Maps?

Story maps are web maps that have been created, given context and provided with supporting information turning it to a great stand-alone resource. Story maps integrating maps, legends, text, photos, graphic images and video to provide functionality, such as swipe, pop-ups, and time sliders, that helps users explore this content.

Story mapping consists of ordering user stories along two independent dimensions. The “map” arranges user activities along the horizontal axis in rough order of priority or the order in which you would describe activities to explain the behavior of the system. Down the vertical axis, it represents increasing sophistication of the implementation.

Why do We Need Story Maps?
We need Story maps as they are designed to avoid a failure mode of incremental delivery, where products could be released composed of features that in principle are of high value but are unusable because they are functionally dependent on features which are of lower value and were therefore deferred to future releases.

How to make User Story Maps?