For our last day of dashboard week, we had to create a dashboard in Tableau using data from the IMDB website. This data included information about the movie or television show, and the cast involved.
I made quite a few mistakes throughout the day as it was a very short turn around to the presentation. It was still a great learning experience however, as you tend to learn a lot more from your failures than your successes. It’s all part of the process.
I started off by looking through the documentation while the data was downloading as to not waste time. Once it was downloaded, I loaded the data I decided to use into Alteryx to view, clean and structure the data. This was my first mistake. Limiting myself by deciding which data I was going to use based purely off the documentation. I decided to only use the ‘Movie Basics’, ‘Ratings’, and ‘Alias’. What I should have done was load in all the tables and filtered them down so I could use all the movie and cast information to add depth to the narrative I was trying to find.
The second mistake I made was a butterfly effect of my first mistake. I spent way too long trying to transform the data so I could use every field. Fields like language and region had poor data integrity as the abbreviations were not consistent due to open ended entry. I should have cut my losses and tried another angle as I ended up spending way too long cleaning and it didn’t end up having any pay-off.
My third mistake was not asking for help. After the first round of cleaning, I loaded my data into tableau and started building my visuals for the dashboard. I then realised my data structure was wrong, and the values were inaccurate. I fell into a loop of rushing the cleaning process and it being wrong. I ended up doing it three more times and it was only my last time in Alteryx did I finally ask for help.
By that time, it was way too late It had already reached 1:15pm by the time I was in Tableau, and we were presenting at 2:30pm. I couldn’t do anything at all similar to original Idea and ended up making a simple ‘movie decider dashboard’. I won’t go into all the issues in the actual dashboard because my actual problem was a lack of time.
I realised after the fact that I had overexerted myself, by the time I reached Friday. Which had left me at a low mental capacity and caused me to make simple mistakes. Most of my mistakes would not have happened If had of taken care of myself more throughout the week and was taking regular breaks, like I usually do.
Friday was a great experience as I always tend to learn the most from failure. I believe If I didn’t have a major failure this week it wouldn’t have been a successful learning experience.
You can see my dashboard here.
Even though in my opinion, it was the weakest dashboard of the week. It’s good to show your failures. You can also find some better dashboard on my tableau public profile as well.
