Want to dramatically boost the user experience of your systems? Ban the word DETAIL from your vocabulary.

Why?

Your interaction designer will call the ingenuity in a particular beautiful piece of code a detail. Your software architect will call the beautiful shading of the buttons a detail. Your project leader will call your daily interactions with your colleagues a detail. Your CEO might call everything EXCEPT the stock price a detail. What do YOU call a detail?

There is nothing wrong in calling something a detail. It a way to focus on what is important to YOU. From early on we are trained to focus on what we are responsible for. We learn to play a role. We get payed according to our role. We get angry if someone takes over a role we are supposed to play.

It’s in our genes. We decent from gorillas. In gorillas the role of a CEO, or chief UX officer, will automatically lead to grey hair growing on your back. As a sign for everyone else to see: “Only my opinion counts, grrrrrr! Everything else is a detail.”

I repeat: There is nothing wrong in calling something a detail. There is nothing wrong in specializing. Divide an conquer, specialization, are essential skills for survival as a group. But creating an amazing user experience is NOT about survival.

Creating a great user experience is about looking at the whole, feeling the story the application is telling you. Perception does not care who is responsible for what part of the system. You have to work with all the other gorillas.

NOT naming things which do not fall into your area of expertise DETAILs really helps!
NOT getting angry if someone else calls your work a DETAIL really helps too.