Dashboard Week Day 4

by Ben Wells

Today’s task was to download Skiddle events data from their API and return all events that are within 50 miles of their hometown or from where they currently live, return the distance from their location to the event and return all fields available in the API. Once we had the data, the task was to create a data visualisation not using Tableau.

The nicest part of today’s challenge was calling the data from the API which was fairly clean. Although you could only bring 100 events from the API at a time and when I tried to create a macro to loop for each day there seemed to be many duplicate results so decided to leave this part. I wasn’t to sure how the API was calling the information as my home town is Brighton which has plenty of events and London is within the 50 mile radius the 100 event limit would be exhausted straight away but seemed to skewed towards pulling more London events even though there would be more than 100 events in Brighton. So I decided to narrow the radius to 5 miles and only look at club events. Here is my Alteryx workflow below:

Next I started to try and make some visualisations in Flourish. I thought I would try and use the features Flourish offered which Tableau did not to create something completely new. Flourish has some really nice looking graphs e.g. bar chart race and some nice looking maps. As the data didn’t really suit a bar or line chart race I thought I would try some maps. Being so unfamiliar in a new tool was frustrating. All data had to be prepped before getting in Flourish which can be time consuming to try out lots of different visualisations quickly. You need to be very sure of what you are visualising, prep the data and then see your results. I wasted a lot of time trying to decide what map/charts I would use and how to configure them. In the end I absolutely failed at making any kind of useful visualisation, so I guess Andy wins this round! All I could get together was a sad looking city level map of clubbing events.

2 mins read

Fri 23 Aug 2019

Tue 20 Aug 2019

Mon 19 Aug 2019