I put Superstore on a dyno in Tableau.

As a developer at Trulyp, I’ve been working on our new release for a while now, but mostly from the side you’d expect as a developer: building features, testing them, finding things that don’t work, fixing them, and then finding new things that don’t work.

Now that it’s out to the world, I finally had some time to play around with it.

I had no plan to make anything useful. I just wanted to mess around with Trulyp Studio and see how far I could push it.

A few hours later, Superstore was on a dyno.

The idea

It started with a simple idea. I wanted to see what Trulyp Studio could do, and how I could make data more interesting to a Data-layman like myself. Ever since I got my license last year, (late, I know), I have been obsessed with older Japanese cars, and I figured, why not make a dashboard entirely in that style?

So I asked Trulyp Studio to make me a “JDM Style goal tachometer with animated RPM needle”.

The result became the Orders Goal gauge you see at the top. Then I reused it for Sales Target, where going past the target sends the needle into the redline, running in the 90’s, which is of course a good thing!

Then I thought: well, if I have a tachometer…

Enter the dyno

This is where I stopped pretending I was doing serious product testing. I wanted a time series, but I wanted it to look like the sort of graph you’d be staring at in a tuning shop after a dyno pull. So Sales became horsepower. Profit became torque. Highest Sales became Peak Power. Highest Profit became Peak Torque.

Perhaps it’s a bit over the top, but the funny thing is that it still works as a visualization. It just happens to look like someone is trying to figure out why their Eclipse is running rich.

Adding the controls

I had some space left in my dashboard, and figured it would be a good idea to be able to choose a sub-category for the data.

I could have used a dropdown, but at this point, I was already addicted to what Trulyp Studio could do, so…

I asked Vizzy to make me nice very retro-feeling knob to change the radio channel product categories that fits with the rest of the visuals. Initially, the colors weren’t really meshing, but then I remembered that I can just change settings within the extension!

Click Technology, Furniture or Office Supplies and the dial physically moves. More importantly, the selection flows through to the other visuals. It’s not even that these categories are set in stone, if you add more categories it simply shows more on the dial! And of course, it works perfectly for filtering in the dashboard.

That was the moment the whole thing clicked for me. The individual visuals are fun, but when they start reacting to each other it becomes something else. Turn a dial, needles move. The dyno changes. The numbers update.

You're still exploring a dataset, it just feels a lot more fun. Of course my first idea was old cars, but your imagination really is the limit here! If you want to represent your sales data in swimming fishes in an aquarium… who will stop you? Trulyp sure won’t!

The Power of Trulyp Studio

Everything in the screenshot was made with Trulyp Studio. No native visuals from Tableau were used, but it’s all running within the platform! As a developer I don’t tend to spend a lot of time making dashboards, but partly also because the process just isn’t very fun! But today, I really felt like I could let my creativity run, and make something I wouldn’t mind using for myself! I think next time I’ll spend some time trying to make a dashboard that lets me see how much fuel I’m using and how much wear I’m putting on my old car…

Anyway, Superstore now has horsepower.