Dashboard Week Day 2: Pinball Machines

The main take away from Day 1 was that I need to plan my time better so I started the day with a plan. The focus today is visual design and analysis – creating something that is engaging to our audience.

Andy gave us some good advice for how to approach a large data-set and how to set your scope. Put yourself in the shoes of the person that might view what you create – what would you want to see?

For today’s brief about pinball machines, what would the end user want to know?

  • Where are pinball machines located?
  • What are the highest scores recorded?
  • Where are the machines most popular?

I spent my morning in Alteryx, calling different APIs and exploring the data. At this point i’m not entirely clear on how i want to visualise the data but i have some ideas. From the APIs i have used, i have data on the following:

  • The countries/regions where the pinball machines are located
  • More precise locations of machines within those regions
  • The types of locations these are
  • High scores for the regions
  • The events in each region


My task now is trying to join all the separate APIs together to create an output i can put into Tableau. I really wanted to include data about the high scores recorded at each machine however I was having trouble finding the correct IDs to join on. Therefore in the interest of time i decided not to include it.

My Final alteryx workflow:

Having brought the data into tableau, I spent my afternoon building different charts, without a particular focus. I was initially hoping that I would discover something interesting and focus my dashboard around that but at 4:00pm I was still looking…. Therefore I created an exploratory dashboard that the user could control based on different filters that they could select.

My Final Dashboard:

Day 2 taught me that if i make a plan for the day, its only helpful if i look at it! Although i had started the day fairly productively, I found that I barely referenced my plan as i got caught up trying to join things in Alteryx or making charts in Tableau. My day then sped by and i found myself rushing again at the end.

My aim therefore for Day 3 is to make a plan that i continually reference and adapt. This way I can ensure that I have time to incorporate interesting insights into my final dashboard without it being rushed!

Author:
Molly Hatch
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