Lesson I learnt from the movie "Project Hail Mary" as a UX designer

Yes, the movie was good. It's amaze, amaze, amaze. :)

Besides that I learnt few points from UX designer point of view and one of them is "Astrophage Problem".

The parallel between Earth's scientists misdiagnosing the cause of solar dimming, and design teams jumping straight to solutions before understanding the real problem.

In the story, Earth's best scientists look at solar dimming and reach for the nearest plausible cause: interstellar dust. It's a reasonable hypothesis. It feels like a diagnosis. But it's a conclusion dressed up as research. The mission plan, resources, and political will all get organised around a wrong answer and the whole thing nearly collapses before anyone asks "but wait, are we sure it's dust?"

In UX teams, the exact same thing happens constantly. A PM says "users are dropping off at checkout." Someone in the room says "they're probably confused by the button label." A designer goes off and redesigns the button. It ships. Drop-off stays the same. Because the real problem was that users didn't trust the return policy, something no one had bothered to look at.

The button was the dust cloud.

What real diagnosis looks like:

The moment the story turns is when Grace suspends his assumptions long enough to actually look at the data. He runs tests. He eliminates possibilities. He follows the evidence somewhere unexpected.

That's discovery. In UX terms: talking to users before you sketch, watching behaviour instead of guessing at it, asking "what problem is actually being experienced?" before "what should we build?"

The UX industry even has a name for its version of the Astrophage mistake: solutionising, jumping to solutions before the problem is properly understood. It feels productive. It produces artifacts. But it's building rockets to deflect dust that was never there.

The uncomfortable truth the story surfaces:

Discovery takes time. Grace's correct diagnosis comes after nearly catastrophic misdirection. In product work, the pressure to ship makes proper diagnosis feel like a luxury. But as the story shows and as many failed product launches confirm, skipping it doesn't save time. It multiplies it.

Well, I couldn't agree more. Fist my bump!

And yes, enjoy this song from Harry Styles...my one of the most gatekeep song happens to appear in this movie.