# Adding User Stories (Work Items)
Now that you have a first slice, you can begin adding user stories to the story map for each activity. There are two ways of adding user stories:
- Drag an existing work item from your product backlog to the story map.
- Create a new user story directly on the map using the plus icon in a cell.
**Note:** Dragging work items to the map is unsupported in Internet Explorer. We recommend using a different browser.
## Dragging Work Items
1. A list of the work items available in your backlog is displayed on the left of the screen (if this area is hidden, click on the arrow above **Backlog explorer** to display your backlog).\
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Work items that have already been added to the map cannot be added to the story map again and are displayed with a grey background. To hide these entries completely, click on the Filter icon above the list so that it turns black: 
1. Click on **Stories/Epics/Features** to restrict the entries in the list to items of that type. Enter text in the text box to filter your work items further:\
1. Once you have identified the work item you want, drag it to the desired cell on the story map:\
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The target position is indicated in blue.
1. Release the mouse button to drop the item at the desired position. The story's parent is automatically set to the work item entered in the column header, as you can see in your backlog:\
## Creating a new story directly on the map
To add a new story to your product backlog directly on the map:
1. Click on the plus icon in the desired cell, select the desired work item type and fill in the title:\
If the user activity (in the column header) has been linked to a work item, the story's parent is automatically set to this work item.
## Add work items assigned already to the iteration
If there are work items already assigned to an iteration, but not present on your map where the iteration is linked to a slice, a warning indicator is displayed (exclamation mark). Click on this indicator to display a list of the missing work items in the Backlog Explorer. You can then quickly add the missing items to your map where they belong.
