# Episode 2: Discovery & Learning

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2024-04-22
- **Format:** Video · 39 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Productivity, Community, Data visualisation
- **Tools:** Alteryx; Power BI; Tableau (calculated fields, lod expressions)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/episode-2-discovery--learning
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DxrBRDWdTc

This is episode two of the What, So What, Now What data and tech podcast, where my co-host Ravi and I dig into discovery versus structured learning. We talk through how we each learnt Tableau, why teaching cements understanding, what design really means, and how software onboarding could be far better.

## Key takeaways

- Blend structured learning with hands-on discovery: take courses and books for fundamentals, but apply techniques to data you care about to understand the full journey, not just the end technique.
- You don't truly understand something until you have to teach it, so share with colleagues, join user groups and enter weekly challenges to create healthy pressure to learn.
- Design is problem solving, not aesthetics: start by asking why you're building something, and even your data model choices shape the end user's experience.
- Borrow from parallel disciplines like photography grids and comic-book storyboarding, and read research papers from people like Maureen Stone, Jock Mackinlay and Hadley Wickham.
- Good tool onboarding could use progressive disclosure, cloud-synced user profiles and usage scoring to surface the right tutorial at the moment of need.

## Chapters

- 0:00 Intro and podcast housekeeping
- 1:26 The what: learning versus discovery
- 6:12 Our different routes into Tableau
- 12:51 Teaching as the test of understanding
- 14:26 Design as problem solving
- 20:04 Learning across tools and disciplines
- 24:40 Now what: fixing onboarding
- 33:15 Now what for teaching the community

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/episode-2-discovery--learning

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena