It’s the last day of Dashboard Week! It’s been a pretty intense week, full of big projects and time crunches. I’ve had a lot of fun experimenting with different tools, but for the last day we took it back to Tableau.
Our coach sent us to the Ben & Jerry’s website, and told us to use whatever tools we wanted to build a dashboard. Of course, this meant we would have to webscrape.
After looking around at the website, I found a page which contained their menu, along with descriptions of the ice creams. The descriptions contained the base ice cream, along with any toppings that came with the pint. This gave me the idea to create a flavor picker!
I normally start by using Excalidraw to sketch out a dashboard, but today I decided to start in Alteryx. This is because I wasn’t sure what data I’d actually be able to collect in Alteryx, and didn’t want to conceptualize the dashboard without knowing what data I’d have.
I first downloaded the website, and then began using RegEx to strategically parse out the data I needed. It ended up being quite easy to get a list of flavors, as well as their ingredients, but I wasn’t too sure what format I would want them in for Tableau. Having verified I could collect the data, I started sketching out some possibilities.
This was my initial sketch. It isn’t quite finished, but the bones are pretty clear. I imagined you could select one base (vanilla, chocolate, etc), and then the list of toppings would update to include only toppings which can be combined with that base.
Then, the user would select a topping, and the list of toppings would further update to only include toppings that can be combined with the selected base AND the selected topping. Once the user was done (or had no more options to choose), they could reveal the corresponding flavor in some other menu option.
I jumped back into Alteryx, and began further transforming the data. I knew the format I wanted the data in, which had 1 column for the flavor, 1 column for base ice cream, and 1 flavor for all the toppings.
I achieved this using a combination of RegEx tools and Text to Columns tools. I also found that for each ice cream flavor on the page I was parsing, there was a link to a secondary page. This secondary page had a longer blurb, a list of allergens, and a photo of the flavor. I decided it was worth parsing out this information as well, so I added to the workflow.
Back in Tableau, I started to build out some sheets. The hardest part of this process was the topping selector, as I needed to store information about all toppings the user has selected so far. This turned out to be harder than I anticipated, so I rolled back a bit and decided to offer only two topping selections. This would be a much easier build process, and I was confident I already knew all the calculations I would need.
I updated my sketch accordingly, and got to work.
A challenge with this concept was the fact that some ice cream flavors (like Chocolate) don’t have any toppings, and others (like Triple Caramel Chunk) only have 1. If I forced the user to pick two toppings before revealing the flavor, I would be hiding all of these flavors. To fix this, I made a calculation (called Flavor Picker), which would test for all of these possibilities and activate the Reveal button if any were true.
The final build came out pretty nicely! Here’s how it looked. Not too bad for a couple hours!
You can check it out on my Tableau Public here.