Engine Works
Under the hood of Alteryx: tips, tricks and how-tos.
A while back, I had a silly idea—what if I could make a Buzzfeed-style personality quiz that tells you which Alteryx tool you are?
Better yet, what if I could make that quiz in Alteryx?
After a bit of experimentation, I would like to introduce my quiz “Which Alteryx Tool Are You?” To find out the answer to this question (which I’m sure you’ve pondered many times), download the App from the Gallery here. I encourage you to take the quiz now and then come back and read about how it works! I would also like to add that I am not calling anyone a tool here, although if you get excited about this quiz, that might make you a nerd. 😉
If you’re curious about how it works, Iet’s dive into the mechanics.
Designing the App
Before putting tools on the canvas, I had to brainstorm the questions for my personality quiz. This was the fun part! The questions and answers might not be on the same level of fun as the Buzzfeed chicken nugget quiz, but I was happy with them.
For this personality quiz, I designed the answers to be on a scale from introverted to extroverted (loosely) so that I could assign numbers to each response and give the final result based on the range that the responses fell under if there was a tie between tool answers.
In Alteryx, I put all the answers that users could select into a text input tool. Then, for each question in the quiz, I formatted the data with a Crosstab tool and used a Drop Down tool so that quiz takers could single-select their answers in the App interface.
The setup for questions 1 and 2
Note: there is a blank row for each question so that the user sees empty selections when they open up the App to take it. When taking the quiz, make sure to select an answer to every question.
The quizterface! (quiz interface)
The bottom section of the App takes the results from the ten questions and applies some logic to get to the final result. Each answer to a question corresponds to one of five tools (spoiler, I didn’t put too many options because that would have taken too long). If there is a majority of one type of tool, then voilà, that’s what result the quiz will show. But, if there’s a tie, it will look at the total points and assign the result according to the range it falls under.
Scoring the results
Then, it creates a very simple report which displays your result and a quick blurb about what your tool type says about you.
The App is on the Gallery for you to play around with. If you want to design your own questions, it could be a fun way to kick off a User Group meeting, break the ice with new analytics team members, etc. With Apps, there are always loads of possibilities!
So… which Alteryx tool are you? I would love to hear in the comments if you resonate with your results!
