Heuristics in Nature

When I begin my career as a UX Designer, Heuristic is the word which kept revolving inside my mind.

I happened to see all the 10 heuristics proposed by Jakob Nielsen. It took me some time to understand what it really is. Even today I find fresh UXers facing the same difficulty. It is all because of the template what we happen to see and evaluate about Heuristics. The template design has given an odd feel to it. Finally, my mentor (Mr. Kingsley Sathish Kumar of UX Mint) helped me to understand heuristics with respect to nature. His insights on this made me understand and remember them easily.

Are you exited to know about this? I will give you a short insight on this. Before we begin, think about nature, how beautiful it is, at the same time how very dangerous. Remember Tsunami, how many lives we lost? South Asia never faced such a natural disaster in past 5 decades.

What was the reason behind that? It was because of tremors at Sumatra Island. That is one of the many reasons behind it. As we dig deeper into that, we will be able to find the root cause.

So what is the root cause of Tsunami in South Asia?

One of the root causes on why Tsunami had such a disastrous impact in South India is that, “N” numbers of coral reef found in Indian Ocean, fishes and other sea species lives near these coral reefs. During the time of fishing, fishermen bomb coral reefs to get bunch of fishes. They have done this and due to this loss to the nature, Tsunami made its way to the land. So what is the relationship between Tsunami and Coral reef? This question triggers lot of sense.

OK!! Get into the concept of heuristics.

Coral reefs are the ones which prevents sea from erosion and some disasters like Tsunami. We can connect this with Error prevention topic in Heuristics. Nature knows about its error (disaster) and made coral reefs to prevent it.

Other examples observed in our day to day life for Error prevention are: Calamus beads which have medicinal value tied in infants hand, they lick and chew it and this prevents Gastritis. Side stand indicator in two wheeler. Plug points enabled with block inside it.

For visibility of the system status. How do we find out whether it is day or night? How do we decide which is which? When there is Sun, we call it as day. That is visibility.

Likewise we are able to explore various examples in nature for other Heuristics too.

Why should we do it?

It is to remember and recollect Heuristics on the longer run. Somewhere, sometime these observations would reflect in our design. That’s fruitful.

Say cheese :D