Dashboard week day 2 - dropping the (pin)ball

by Theo Isaac

So as that awful title maybe gave away, day 2 of dashboard week hit me pretty hard. Today was looking at pinball data which we needed to download from Pinball Maps API.

It all started fairly well, with my API requests going through and managing to download the data sets i wanted. However, the trouble came when i tried to join a data set on the top scorers on each machine with the location dataset and machine information data set. The issue lay in the fact that there were about 8 different ID codes that could have been used to join these data sets – and no clear documentation to help map these joins. I had originally decided to base my analysis around the top players for a particular region, so i really had my heart set on joining these data sets.

So i tried, in vain, to join these data sets. What was particularly annoying was i felt that the final correct join wasnt too far away, but i had wasted 3/4 of my day on this and so had to move on. My (horribly messy) Alteryx flow is below:

In the end, the data i took into Tableau was only information on the locations and machine info of these pinball machines. While some analysis was possible from this, i knew i had wasted too long on the data prep to produce a dashboard that had a more in-depth analysis. I tried to make the dashboard a way for users to find the locations of these machines, and the types of games that were popular in each country. The use of circle filter button and my lollipop chart was aiming to reflect the shape of pinballs.

https://public.tableau.com/profile/theodore.isaac#!/vizhome/Dashboardweekday2-PinballMachinesAcrosstheWorld/Dashboard1

My finished dashboard is below: