Attention to Detail
Nowadays, fewer and fewer people seem to care about the details. We move fast, generate stuff with AI, and release work quickly. Even though the work might seem fine, we often overlook the small things that can make a difference. In such an environment, details are the main differentiator between good and great work.
What do I mean by details? Usually small, individual features, distinc parts of something, e.g. products, but also services, or even processes.
Look at the best products and tools - Apple devices, Linear, or Superhuman's designs. They all share this native feeling of quality, and ease of use. This is not an accident.
Why even care about details?
The deeper we get into the AI era, the more we will be surrounded by AI-generated tools, apps, and pages. People build quickly, get excited about the new shiny thing, and move on. As AI tools build stuff for them, they just check basic functionality, without paying attention to detail, not to mention aesthetics, but more about the functionality side. Then the errors pop up, the UI looks mediocre, and code isn't scalable. It gets worse with every new request, as LLM starts to follow conventions that are already here - even the bad ones.
Typical AI-generated landing page
Don't get me wrong, it's fine to move fast, especially at the beginning of a project. But as we mature and want to build something that lasts, the details matter more and more. Don’t you want to build The Product, not just another one? Well, let’s try to answer this question: do you prefer to use a well-designed, easy-to-use tool, or a clunky one that makes you struggle to get to the basic functionality?
You need to answer it yourself. The easiest way will be to inspect your phone and see the apps that you use. My best example is a ski tracking app. All of my friends and family use a random, ugly app that just works. No one actually knows why they got this specific one, while I took some effort and found the Slopes app. I like to inspect it, just because of the details they show - both my skiing stats, and the aesthetics of the showcase. It's not an advertisement, I just like it.
How to start paying attention?
The answer will be different for everyone, but for sure, you need to master your craft. As a software/product engineer, I started to not only make something working, but to deliver top quality - from microinteractions (Emil's course is great to start with that), through error handling (it’s extremely important for the end user, despite being such a pain for devs), to overall user experience, via every product interaction. It’s like when you started with what you do, you need to learn all of that first.
If you are into software, I would start by inspecting the best products you stumbled upon. See Linear, Resend, Revolut, or Flighty. Then dive into tuning small details in your projects. If you are working on the frontend, take care of the user’s microinteractions - make sure you provide visual feedback for small actions - hover states, button clicks, color changes. Tune easing, transition/animation duration, color changes. Make these with the intention to enhance UX, not just to animate things. Then move to bigger parts e.g., enhance error messages, make sure users understand what happened and what to do to fix that. At the end, inspect the entire user flow, make sure they are able to go through the product, easily switch between desired screens, and find what they need quickly. It’s your job to define specifics here.
Interact with buttons
You might not work on UI, and that’s fine as well. Take care of your backend too. Start small with making sure your logs are well-formatted, they are in one place & they are actually providing value to others. Optimize your DB queries, code & performance of the app. All of that matters as well, as long as you make life better for someone! That’s also what we are after here.