Google Web Stories

Google push to add Web Stories to sites continues with new playbook and Figma design kit

Abner Li | May 10 2021 - 9:50 am PT

Over the past few months, Google has released a number of resources to encourage the adoption of Web Stories. The latest is a Google playbook and Figma design kit on how to integrate Web Stories into existing websites.

At launch, the biggest “entry point” for Web Stories was people encountering them in the Discover feed. Google is now increasingly encouraging that these AMP-powered Stories be directly added to websites.

A key entrypoint is your own website, where Web Stories can enable you to create rich modern user experiences for your users. The playbook comes with illustrative examples to inspire you to build great experiences on your site. These entry point designs are flexible and can work to showcase both one Web Story or multiple.

Those experiences include carousels of rectangular or circular cards, a grid view with up to four columns, or a list of stacked stories. Google last month announced custom WordPress embed options and native theme integration. Another option is integrating the Web Story Player into a site:

The Web Story Player makes it easy for users to swipe between multiple Stories and even enables you to personalize what story to show next. When Stories are easy to discover, views and engagement can increase — offering more opportunities to monetize your content.

The Google playbook features over 105 slides and covers the Singleton, Carousel, Compact display, Author highlight, and Dedicated page entry points in great detail, while also talking about Web Stories monetization. The first few pages provide a good overview, while best practices and fundamentals are discussed later on.

Google has also released a design kit on Figma to allow creators to “customize the elements in this document to fit your own brand and web guidelines.”