On the third day of Dashboard Week, the task laid out for us involved using an API to retrieve information on the infamous TV show Rick and Morty.
Data Extraction and Cleaning:
In the initial step, my focus was on using Alteryx to make an API Call to retrieve information about the Rick and Morty TV show. This data served as the basis for my analysis and visualization efforts.
Take a look at the website here ( https://rickandmortyapi.com/ ):
Alteryx Data Prep & Creating an API Call:
I utilized Alteryx for the web scrapping and data extraction portion of this project. In addition, Alteryx was used to streamline and cleanse the obtained dataset. This step ensured that the data was structured and ready for integration into Tableau Desktop for the creation of the dashboard.
Below is a snapshot of my Alteryx flow, the steps involved were:
- Accessing the API using the Input tool with the base API URL, then downloading the JSON data using the Download tool, and then Parsing it using the JSON Parse tool.
- The API used has pagination, meaning the data is spread across multiple pages, as a result, the API must be called more than once to get all of the information required. Using the Filter tool in three iterations, I filtered out the Rick and Morty episode names, the date they aired, and the episode info field containing season and episode numbers.
- Using the Select tool I removed unwanted fields and renamed the fields I kept.
- Using the Union tool I unioned the episode info for each filter iteration and then used the Multi-Join tool to join by positioning all the episode information with the season and episode number
- To separate the Regex tool to parse the episode info field into season number and episode number
- The Select tool was used to rearrange the fields in the order I wanted.
- As part of the final goal, I wanted to find pop culture references. I imported a data set with this information and used the Join tool to join it with the episode information
- Finally, I used the Output tool to output the data as an Excel file and Tableau Hyper file.
Below is a snapshot of my Alteryx flow, the steps involved were:
Alteryx Output:
Design and Wireframing:
I then began the design process by creating a wireframe to get my ideas onto the screen before diving into Tableau Desktop.
A screenshot of my wireframe can be seen below:
Dashboard Creation Leveraging the wireframe as a guide, I crafted the final dashboard using Tableau Desktop. My focus for the Dashboard was on the first three seasons of Rick and Morty and showing a pop culture reference for each. The idea was to allow users to hover over the picture of the episode and get a summary of the pop culture references for that episode.
Here is a snapshot of the Tableau Dashboard:
You can see the dashboard on Tableau Public here: Tableau Public
Challenges Encountered:
During this project, I encountered hurdles related to using images within Tableau Desktop with image roles. I instead chose to use images as shapes for each episode.
The third day of Dashboard Week presented a few challenges, particularly with handling images in Tableau Desktop. However, the project was completed and I like how the Dashboard was developed.