Creating Visuals With Plotly

For this week's assignment we were asked to create a visual using plotly.com. This was a new frame work that I had never tried before, and I was interested in trying it out. I decided to use my own data set from some data I had been collecting from a game called Zed.run. It is a crypto horse racing game, where you can breed, buy, sell and race your digital race horses.

For this assignment I wanted to visualize the average finish time of horses in class for through out the available race distances. I queried and exported my data into a csv and imported it into Plotly's website for visualization. My data consisted of the race distances and average times over 4 time frames. 0-30 days, 30-60 days, 60-90 days and 90-120 days. Basically I was curious to find out if over the last 4 months the average finish time of horses has decreased, meaning that horses have gotten faster. I think this is helpful to see if my horses have sped up or slowed down over the last 4 months. Without looking at the data I imported it into plotly to visually see what my results would be.

At first I tried using a scatter graph to show me my data but you had to zoom in a ton to be able to see the data then reset the view to see the reset of the plots.

On top of that it was hard to determine which one of those x's was which time frame. So i tried a bar graph and while it was easier to read the data I thought that was too basic as there were more options for the types of graphs I could create.

I decided to use a 3d scatter which is what you see here. Depending on how it is orientated you can view the axis show time frame, average finish time and the distance. This graph was much easier to read than the other and displayed what the information I wanted to know.

Plotlys website also allowed you to easily export the graph and you can make multiple graphs by adding more traces. I could embed an image so I threw the zed logo in the images that you see here. This platform seems to be much better than Tableau. I look forward to using this more to create more powerful visualizations and dashboards.

Plotly also allows you to easily take screen shots of your visuals and exports the visuals into an html file that can be added to a website. Due to the fact I use a headless cms for my website I am not able to embed my visiaul to my blog page but i could easily build out a seperate page for it if needed.