Dashboard Week 1 - UK Crime App (DS24)

To kick dashboard week off we were tasked with building an app in Alteryx which, when prompted by the user would return a certain category of crimes committed in a certain time period and then render a dashboard to visualize this data.

This was an Alteryx heavy challenge which was fun because as a cohort we had limited time to work on Alteryx in the weekly client projects. Luckily for us, in a session with Ben Moss we actually covered the crime data API, and so I referred back to this session in order to access location data for specific London Postcodes.

His workflow is shown below:

Once I had a user input which pulled the location data, I set up some user inputs for the category, start and end dates. This was tricky as I was unsure how to access the specified data, as the API only allowed you to select a specific month. To get around this, I created a text file with all the possible months and then append those months which fell within (and included) the selected time period. And then filtered accordingly. I then did some date creations and tidying up before outputting to a .hyper file to be used for my dashboard.

The final workflow is shown here:

And the App interface looks as follows:

Once I could access the relevant data via the app, I started building my dashboard. Due to the fact that you already filter to category in the app, this left minimal filtering options in the actual dashboard. It is therefore a fairly simple dashboard summarizing the data.

As shown, the dashboard tells you the postcode, category and date range you have selected - as well as the total incidents, incidents over time,  incident outcomes and a map of incident location.

All in all this was a fun project which challenged our Alteryx ability, and pushed us to integrate both Alteryx and Tableau together!

Bring on Tuesday!

Author:
Garth Turner
Powered by The Information Lab
1st Floor, 25 Watling Street, London, EC4M 9BR
Subscribe
to our Newsletter
Get the lastest news about The Data School and application tips
Subscribe now
© 2025 The Information Lab