3 lessons from Sherlock Holmes for user experience designers
I am trying my best to beat my insominia by not taking a nap in the afternoon. So I gave myself permission to Netflix a little today. I ended up watching Sherlock series again.
I know the stories but today I observed it closely. It felt like User Experience career lessons in a series 😜
Ofcourse we are not solving murder mysteries in our prodocut world but the skillsets are very similar.
Here are top 3 unobvious lessons I took away from Sherlock Holmes as a designer:
- I was amazed that Sherlock was able to take his mind off from work and focus on lighter things when needed despite being a workaholic. As creative problem solvers we end up working 24X7 (in shower, in kitchen, in the gym, in our walks etc).
We can't stop thinking how to make better because there are so many possibilities in front of us at all times. Design never ends and if we don't know how to give some rest to mind like Sherlock we will end up in a bad place. - It was interesting to see Sherlock getting annoyed with irrelevant information. I thought his world has little or no information but he was overloaded. Imagine our lives.
His ability to extract signal from noise is a super skill we all need in our information laden world. It is easy to be swayed by too much data, unwanted metrics, feature requests, UX debts and more. As designers we must filter signal from noise and find that thing which adds immense value to users. - In the first episode, the case looks very straightforward. However Sherlock goes ahead and digs deeper into deductive reasoning and show how all assumptions and string of events do not add up.
As designers, it is our duty to question every assumption. Even if the evidence shows a certain direction, it is important to investigate and question the correctness. Not everything we assume is correct. It is good to validate with real users.
The other usual suspects like observing deeply, not concluding anything without data, going out to the field and checking the details for real is expected from Sherlock but the above 3 lessons stood out to me today.
What is your pick as a Sherlock fan?
🥂 to deduction!