However, most folks (not just designers) have a difficult time with compromise, these days. It's become a value judgment (You're "weak," if you compromise).
I learned, when I was a kid, that I can't always get what I want (I think that someone even sang about it, way back then).
The art of compromise, is one of the most valuable skills I had, during my career, and I'm still at it. In fact, I was just texting with a team member, a few minutes ago, where we have to come to a compromise.
People seem focused on the interpersonal conflict angle in the comments here, i.e. winning and losing in a battle of wills.
I think its just as important to realize ideas themselves can be conflicted or contradictory, and that practical action requires compromise. Many seductive ideas may not be well-formed if you really dig deeply enough. It's not just economic or political pragmatism. Even the solo designer/thinker needs to compromise such untested ideas in search of a realizable system.
I believe people are focusing on that because that's a traditional meaning of the word — Merriam-Webster uses "concession" in 2 out of 3 definitions. I would say that an impersonal "compromise" was more of a figure of speech that evolved into another meaning of the word.
The OP here talks about a compromise between two ideas, which means that it could be a single person making trade-offs based on their conscious choices about where the (bigger) value is.
The negative connotation is also mostly personal — it's like glass half-full or half-empty question: one can say that in a compromise, two people/ideas are going away with some of their desire/value unfulfilled, or that both are going away with some of their desire/value fulfilled.
Well yes, as a designer the thing people do not understand is that e.g. for a poster there is a limited bandwidth for messages you can get across. The "uncompromising" business guy may think he is uncompromising by putting all infos he really wants to push onto the poster, but in fact that just means they are deluding every single message they really wanted to push.
In reality you always have to compromise if you aim to achieve more than one thing at once. Wanna deliver a quality product and earn money? Then you will have to compromise between the quality and the revenue in some ways. Granted if you search hard you may be able to find ways (=compromises) that are more win-win on both fronts than others, this search is the task of any good designer.
But that means you have to have at least have to have a slither of understanding of the search space.
> However, most folks (not just designers) have a difficult time with compromise, these days. It's become a value judgment (You're "weak," if you compromise).
I think you got it exactly backwards. I'll explain why.
Your bias (and the blogger's) rears its head by the way you chose words such as "compromise" to discuss design processes. Words reflect and shape thought processes, and by choosing words such as "compromise" or "concession" you are already framing the process as a battle of wills. Design instead works with affordances, patterns, constraints and tradeoffs. None of these require you to argue or disagree with others, or others with you. Your goal is to seek the best design given your tradeoffs, and there is no single optimal way to pull this off. Seeking consensus doesn't require battling out people's opinions.
So why do people choose to use conflict-driven words to describe the process? Do you carry a conflict-driven mindset when tackling a design problem? I mean, look at the way you frame the process: someone comes with feedback and opinions, and your gut response is that you feel compelled to fight them? That warrants some soul searching.
I don't think the blogger uses compromise to refer to conflicting personal opinions. Consider a complex UI like photoshop. If you have too many buttons available on the screen at all times, the UI becomes bloated and hard to navigate (cough, GIMP). If you cut out too many features, you'll loose users who rely on those tools. If you move items to sub menus, or sub sub menus, you make the UI cleaner, but risk users never finding those features, or you risk introducing too much friction for anyone to want to use them. So the compromise here is what features to present the user for quick access, and what features to hide behind indirection. This is a difficult problem, and requires deep understanding of your users and their needs/habits.
Compromise is a lose-lose. It originally meant a promise between two parties to follow the decision of an arbiter. Sometimes this is the best we can hope to do, and right and necessary in order to have nice things: see for instance the Wikipedia essay "The Wrong Version", https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wrong_Version or the Northern Ireland peace process. However, a mutual preference is a win-win, and is a creative new idea instead of merely splitting differences, and is way superior, if you can get one. Often people don't make the distinction and call both things compromises.
...why the downvote, please (mystery downvoter)? I can only read that as saying "No! You must not arrogantly hope to be creative and solve problems for mutual benefit! It's important that everyone be quiet and learn to suffer!"
No, a compromise can also be a win-win. It balances potentially extreme positions, it adds further perspectives, it forces all parties to consider what is most important to them. If the only alternative to a compromise is no agreement, it may actually be the only way to win
Yes, when you can, find "The 3rd Alternative". It's a nice idea I first read about in one of Steven Covey's books. Looks like he eventually wrote a book by that name.
Framing everything as a binary win/lose outcome is pretty naïve no matter how much terminology you dress it up with. Also, complaining about downvotes is a good way to attract downvotes.
Compromise is the last tool in the designer's toolbox. Before settling with a compromise, the designer should relentlessly try to narrow down what the problem being solved is, while trying out all possibilities, until it looks like there is no solution that matches exactly the problem (or they run out of time).
More often than not, a compromise means that the problem wasn't scoped out well enough, and it ends up partially solving a problem that didn't need solving.
Edit: I do think it's about trade-offs though. Choosing to solve one problem, acknowledging another problem will be disregarded.
That’s not my experience. Every decision favors one use case or principle over another. The best design is when you have the vision and confidence to say what’s important for each those decisions and what you’re ok leaving out.
It depends on how you define compromise. Is it a compromise to consider things like screen size, load wait times, or the average expected user's attention span? If so, then design is a big juggling act of compromise.
If not, and compromise is just stuff like "add yet another floating ad footer to make the c-suite happy," then absolutely it should be the last tool.
I fundamentally disagree with the premise. Why are we attempting to change the meaning of the word compromise? “compromise” and “has trade-offs” are NOT synonymous. The antithesis of compromise is to make strong decisions that WILL alienate people, but will better target your intended audience. That, IMHO, is a great thing.
Every decision is a trade-off even when people don’t realize it.
If you avoid making strong decisions that’s usually also a trade-off since you trade let’s say peace of mind / not alienating people with having a sharp spike.
I often urge people to do deliberate trade-offs instead of just waiting it out.
> strong decisions that WILL alienate people, but will better target your intended audience. That, IMHO, is a great thing
That's supposing you have a well defined intended audience. Many people see it as a prerequisite, that's also how we ended up with the personas during research.
I'd argue there are many designs that should go beyond a specific intended audience and allow for larger reach and minimize alienating people. My reasoning is that in part we're just not good at properly analyzing requirements (it's just hard) and people's needs are also volatile. Trying to design the perfect things for a narrow target often results in something just really bad.
As a concrete example, mouse makers targeting specific hand size and shape for specific actions usually end up with a worse product even for their intended audience. Having more leeway to hold it differently, change the way you use it e.g. depending on the time of the day or task at hand is just more comfortable. The best mouses on the market are pretty forgiving and flexible. Heck, the most clamored pointing devices (Apple trackpads and Kensington style trackballs) are completely hand agnostic.
Once constraints are fixed you can choose your tradeoff among dimensions, that’s the compromise.
But constraints are not fixed, you can optimize, discover new techniques and change the space of requirements.
For example thanks to computer scientists we get better and better algorithms for compression, and thanks to hardware companies we get new / faster chips with different models to do new kinds of computation
Thus, you can move the compromise space, by working harder
That’s true. But in a business context I’ve found the opposite mindset is helpful. Anything which might be a constrain which is not contrary to your goal is probably a real constraint. Yes in theory you can rebuild X, Y, Z but what can we actually do in this initiative. I’ve taken to even taking social constraints as real and I communicate them to my management in that way.
Is this a response to marketing lingo specifically or some other cultural phenomenon? There's a difference between what you want to do to advance your goals (e.g. compromising), and what you want to say for visibility for whoever's goals they are (e.g. "uncompromising" the customer's goals).
There might be a deeper point being communicated, not sure, but I see no issue here.
Something similar can be said about "values". They help you make hard decisions. You don't need values if only make easy decisions.
But values conflicts with each other. You can't value more than a few at the same time. E.g. If you make a decision which is good for your employee who is struggling (value employee), it may not be a good decision for your client who is already delayed (value client/speed). Etc..
For me (non native speaker), compromise and tradeoff or not completely the same, and I would favor the latter for this article. Tradeoff conveys the coupling of the alternatives. Design for one goal trades away another. Compromise does not carry that coupling directly imho.
Just FYI. I had a bit of a watershed, in my life, when I read Scott Jenson's The Simplicity Shift[0]
It was written in Ye Time Beefore Ye iffowne, so mobile UI was really limited.
It's all about compromise. How to prioritize, and how to develop UI that was usable and affordable, while still maintaining some design integrity. It also talks a lot about how to work with others, and come up with compromises that work well.
Higher-level design often involves dissolving apparent tensions or opposites through layering or more sophisticated mechanisms, while preserving the benefits of both.
Example ->
Proposition: "Phew, we have to choose between convenience and security."
Naive design: "Let's find a watered-down compromise."
Good design: "Let's layer security on top of convenience by designing the system so users don't have to choose, or water either one down."
Great companies have a history of dissolving apparent contradictions under a single roof via good design.
Some might actually say that they found "a perfect compromise" where both use-cases are served well — this seems to be very much a linguistic preference today, regardless of the fact that "compromise" originally came from "making concessions".
Creating a product and touting how secure it is while some jackass manager continually cuts the budget for security fixes? It’s self-defeating to throw up your hands and say “oh, we had to compromise.”
The reality is that decision-making is about power. If you are continually losing all the tradeoffs, that says all you need to know.
Sometimes power is in the hands of people who use it in ways that will tank the company, all while everyone else “compromises” so we all ride the express train to a failure.
Design is about limiting the actions available to guide the user towards a preferred set of outcomes. A good tool makes it easier to get good results and harder to get bad results.
Of course, what “good results” are depends entirely on what you’re trying to accomplish, which is why picking the right tool for the job is so important.
Not quite. Design is about optimization (of user experience, performance etc). Optimization implies constraints. Constraints are what made you think of "compromise".
Compromise is stuff like what I'm going through, right now. The user needs to know that a set of locations on a map, can also be displayed as a sortable list, but the affordances for that access are not working with the overall design. It's extremely easy to add a button, but it messes with the screen layout.
We'll figure it out, but we can't ignore it. It's too important to our users, so we may have to make a graphical compromise. It's really tempting to think that "stupid users should know better," but that's a fairly destructive mindset.
Optimization implies constraints. But multiple targets implies compromise. How do you optimize for multiple measurements without compromise? You have to decide how to weight each against the other.
"How can I maximize my widgets-produced-in-six-months output given that I'm constrained by having $x budget?" - constraint that could give you a different solution than higher or lower budget.
"How can I maximize my widgets-produced-in-six months output AND my customer satisfaction given that I'm constrained by having $x budget" - now you have to compromise one or the other.
Here I'm talking about the physical design of how the widget is made as it's the first super-concrete example that popped to mind, but almost any sort of design operates in a similar multiple-goals world.
"Design is compromise" is basically saying that the thing you're optimizing is not at its optimum for all the variables separately which is often true, and therefore it is not a remarkable thing to say, and it is also not necessarily true.
To join in the pedantry: I always see optimization as being about compromise. Free wins that are strictly superior aren’t optimizations, they’re just doing it properly. Optimization is to make certain properties better, usually at the cost of others.
Optimization is not same as compromise. Optimization is about having freedom to tweak the parameters with the goal of maximzing somthing. Compromise focuses on lack of freedom. The terms focus on different areas of the overall situation. Design happens within the optimization context, which is shaped by the constraints.
Even te business folks know this, at least those who read “The Innovator’s Dilemma”.
All the very successful-yet-failing companies were unable to understand these compromises, and each was overturned by a newcomer that could (usually due to necessity, of course)
The terminology can be confusing because in corporate speak being uncompromising can mean being opinionated. Not "we made no tradeoffs" but "we didn't split the difference."
The article means it as tradeoff rather than concession, so the argument is "to avoid design by committee you have to compromise on purpose."
Well there's compromise that means multi-dimensional constraint optimization, and that's fine. But a lot of time what people mean by compromise is they compromised on cost, or on effort, or on attentiveness. Colloquially that's what people usually mean when they use the word with a negative connotation.
Every decision is a compromise, if it's not a compromise then it's not a decision just pure delusion or worse mis-engineering or perhaps there was never a decision there to begin with.
Design is one of the clearest examples, since it's filled with decisions about stuff, but just picking how you type which keyboard you use everything is a compromise. If perfect things existed everything and everyone would have naturally converged on it over enough time, but we rarely seem to see that happen outside monopolies built on network effects or extreme subsidisation.
I think the hallmark of a good designer is knowing which things can be compromised and which things absolutely should never be. Different designers will have different opinions on what those things are.
Here’s an unpopular opinion. almost all ui customization should be buried in settings menus and not available as easy to do my mistake gestures.
The first time I want into this was when MS word would let you drag icons off the toolbar if you pressed slightly too long. suddenly your toolbar loses a feature because you accidentally dragged the icon off which was the gesture for removing the icon. Absolutely no one needed that shortcut gesture. People who wanted to customize, which is rare, could have dug into some customization setting. Instead, for every one person that wanted to edit their toolbar, 100 others got frustrated when their app stopped functioning
Unfortunately designed love these bad designs. Mac and iOS are full of them. I did some gesture just a few days ago that magically pulled the left shortcuts off the finder. Something I never wanted to do.
So many of my family member have lost the picture of their loved ones on their iPhone lock screen because of the stupid gesture to set it as it’s too easy to do by accident. Leaving as a settings option only would be much better.
Same with the charging clocks that appear and their stupid swipe to change. Several times a week, reaching for the phone when I wake up, the clock gets swapped even though I have a choice I want and then I have to go spend time putting it back. Worse, it’s not even intuitive because up/down change one thing and left/right change another. No user needs this shortcut. It probably exists so the clock designer can check all their designs. No fucks given what’s good for users. I’m sure they misinterpret their metrics as positive feedback
similar to what a person is capable of. we cant be good at everything, we're specialists; backend engineers, frontend developers, machine learning engineers, etc... as in design, it cannot appeal to every eye, being opinionated makes good design stand out.
Another way to put it: design is the outcome of an optimization against a given set of objectives and constraints. This would also help to keep track of the reasoning underlying changes in the design to provide an audit trail.
> Compromise is neither good nor bad, it’s something we do every day.
because compromise usually means "the wrong answer because an imbecile is necessary for consensus"
A benevolent and competent Authoritiarian is the best form of governance, everyone is just worried about the successor. But that nirvana period functions well due to no compromise and the right choices being made in quick succession.
>Compromise is neither good nor bad, it’s something we do every day. It’s decision making. Prioritizing. Deciding that one thing is more important than another.
It's AI slop.
Edit: as pointed to me, it says 2018. I'd be damned. Guess that makes it merely part of the "LinkedIn post" training set pushing AI towards such style!
Absolutely spot-on.
However, most folks (not just designers) have a difficult time with compromise, these days. It's become a value judgment (You're "weak," if you compromise).
I learned, when I was a kid, that I can't always get what I want (I think that someone even sang about it, way back then).
The art of compromise, is one of the most valuable skills I had, during my career, and I'm still at it. In fact, I was just texting with a team member, a few minutes ago, where we have to come to a compromise.
People seem focused on the interpersonal conflict angle in the comments here, i.e. winning and losing in a battle of wills.
I think its just as important to realize ideas themselves can be conflicted or contradictory, and that practical action requires compromise. Many seductive ideas may not be well-formed if you really dig deeply enough. It's not just economic or political pragmatism. Even the solo designer/thinker needs to compromise such untested ideas in search of a realizable system.
I believe people are focusing on that because that's a traditional meaning of the word — Merriam-Webster uses "concession" in 2 out of 3 definitions. I would say that an impersonal "compromise" was more of a figure of speech that evolved into another meaning of the word.
The OP here talks about a compromise between two ideas, which means that it could be a single person making trade-offs based on their conscious choices about where the (bigger) value is.
The negative connotation is also mostly personal — it's like glass half-full or half-empty question: one can say that in a compromise, two people/ideas are going away with some of their desire/value unfulfilled, or that both are going away with some of their desire/value fulfilled.
1 reply →
Well yes, as a designer the thing people do not understand is that e.g. for a poster there is a limited bandwidth for messages you can get across. The "uncompromising" business guy may think he is uncompromising by putting all infos he really wants to push onto the poster, but in fact that just means they are deluding every single message they really wanted to push.
In reality you always have to compromise if you aim to achieve more than one thing at once. Wanna deliver a quality product and earn money? Then you will have to compromise between the quality and the revenue in some ways. Granted if you search hard you may be able to find ways (=compromises) that are more win-win on both fronts than others, this search is the task of any good designer.
But that means you have to have at least have to have a slither of understanding of the search space.
1 reply →
> However, most folks (not just designers) have a difficult time with compromise, these days. It's become a value judgment (You're "weak," if you compromise).
I think you got it exactly backwards. I'll explain why.
Your bias (and the blogger's) rears its head by the way you chose words such as "compromise" to discuss design processes. Words reflect and shape thought processes, and by choosing words such as "compromise" or "concession" you are already framing the process as a battle of wills. Design instead works with affordances, patterns, constraints and tradeoffs. None of these require you to argue or disagree with others, or others with you. Your goal is to seek the best design given your tradeoffs, and there is no single optimal way to pull this off. Seeking consensus doesn't require battling out people's opinions.
So why do people choose to use conflict-driven words to describe the process? Do you carry a conflict-driven mindset when tackling a design problem? I mean, look at the way you frame the process: someone comes with feedback and opinions, and your gut response is that you feel compelled to fight them? That warrants some soul searching.
I don't think the blogger uses compromise to refer to conflicting personal opinions. Consider a complex UI like photoshop. If you have too many buttons available on the screen at all times, the UI becomes bloated and hard to navigate (cough, GIMP). If you cut out too many features, you'll loose users who rely on those tools. If you move items to sub menus, or sub sub menus, you make the UI cleaner, but risk users never finding those features, or you risk introducing too much friction for anyone to want to use them. So the compromise here is what features to present the user for quick access, and what features to hide behind indirection. This is a difficult problem, and requires deep understanding of your users and their needs/habits.
I don’t consider it a conflict-driven process, but it seems that you know me, better than I know myself, so I won’t argue.
> I learned, when I was a kid, that I can't always get what I want (I think that someone even sang about it, way back then).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Can%27t_Always_Get_What_Yo...
Compromise is a lose-lose. It originally meant a promise between two parties to follow the decision of an arbiter. Sometimes this is the best we can hope to do, and right and necessary in order to have nice things: see for instance the Wikipedia essay "The Wrong Version", https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wrong_Version or the Northern Ireland peace process. However, a mutual preference is a win-win, and is a creative new idea instead of merely splitting differences, and is way superior, if you can get one. Often people don't make the distinction and call both things compromises.
...why the downvote, please (mystery downvoter)? I can only read that as saying "No! You must not arrogantly hope to be creative and solve problems for mutual benefit! It's important that everyone be quiet and learn to suffer!"
No, a compromise can also be a win-win. It balances potentially extreme positions, it adds further perspectives, it forces all parties to consider what is most important to them. If the only alternative to a compromise is no agreement, it may actually be the only way to win
8 replies →
Yes, when you can, find "The 3rd Alternative". It's a nice idea I first read about in one of Steven Covey's books. Looks like he eventually wrote a book by that name.
1 reply →
Framing everything as a binary win/lose outcome is pretty naïve no matter how much terminology you dress it up with. Also, complaining about downvotes is a good way to attract downvotes.
10 replies →
Compromise is the last tool in the designer's toolbox. Before settling with a compromise, the designer should relentlessly try to narrow down what the problem being solved is, while trying out all possibilities, until it looks like there is no solution that matches exactly the problem (or they run out of time).
More often than not, a compromise means that the problem wasn't scoped out well enough, and it ends up partially solving a problem that didn't need solving.
Edit: I do think it's about trade-offs though. Choosing to solve one problem, acknowledging another problem will be disregarded.
That’s not my experience. Every decision favors one use case or principle over another. The best design is when you have the vision and confidence to say what’s important for each those decisions and what you’re ok leaving out.
It depends on how you define compromise. Is it a compromise to consider things like screen size, load wait times, or the average expected user's attention span? If so, then design is a big juggling act of compromise.
If not, and compromise is just stuff like "add yet another floating ad footer to make the c-suite happy," then absolutely it should be the last tool.
When you give someone a problem, they can find a solution, but if you give them a dilemma then a compromise is almost a given.
True dilemmas are rare though, often it just means insufficient investigation of your requirements
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I fundamentally disagree with the premise. Why are we attempting to change the meaning of the word compromise? “compromise” and “has trade-offs” are NOT synonymous. The antithesis of compromise is to make strong decisions that WILL alienate people, but will better target your intended audience. That, IMHO, is a great thing.
Every decision is a trade-off even when people don’t realize it.
If you avoid making strong decisions that’s usually also a trade-off since you trade let’s say peace of mind / not alienating people with having a sharp spike.
I often urge people to do deliberate trade-offs instead of just waiting it out.
> strong decisions that WILL alienate people, but will better target your intended audience. That, IMHO, is a great thing
That's supposing you have a well defined intended audience. Many people see it as a prerequisite, that's also how we ended up with the personas during research.
I'd argue there are many designs that should go beyond a specific intended audience and allow for larger reach and minimize alienating people. My reasoning is that in part we're just not good at properly analyzing requirements (it's just hard) and people's needs are also volatile. Trying to design the perfect things for a narrow target often results in something just really bad.
As a concrete example, mouse makers targeting specific hand size and shape for specific actions usually end up with a worse product even for their intended audience. Having more leeway to hold it differently, change the way you use it e.g. depending on the time of the day or task at hand is just more comfortable. The best mouses on the market are pretty forgiving and flexible. Heck, the most clamored pointing devices (Apple trackpads and Kensington style trackballs) are completely hand agnostic.
[flagged]
Once constraints are fixed you can choose your tradeoff among dimensions, that’s the compromise.
But constraints are not fixed, you can optimize, discover new techniques and change the space of requirements.
For example thanks to computer scientists we get better and better algorithms for compression, and thanks to hardware companies we get new / faster chips with different models to do new kinds of computation
Thus, you can move the compromise space, by working harder
That’s true. But in a business context I’ve found the opposite mindset is helpful. Anything which might be a constrain which is not contrary to your goal is probably a real constraint. Yes in theory you can rebuild X, Y, Z but what can we actually do in this initiative. I’ve taken to even taking social constraints as real and I communicate them to my management in that way.
Is this a response to marketing lingo specifically or some other cultural phenomenon? There's a difference between what you want to do to advance your goals (e.g. compromising), and what you want to say for visibility for whoever's goals they are (e.g. "uncompromising" the customer's goals).
There might be a deeper point being communicated, not sure, but I see no issue here.
Something similar can be said about "values". They help you make hard decisions. You don't need values if only make easy decisions.
But values conflicts with each other. You can't value more than a few at the same time. E.g. If you make a decision which is good for your employee who is struggling (value employee), it may not be a good decision for your client who is already delayed (value client/speed). Etc..
For me (non native speaker), compromise and tradeoff or not completely the same, and I would favor the latter for this article. Tradeoff conveys the coupling of the alternatives. Design for one goal trades away another. Compromise does not carry that coupling directly imho.
Just FYI. I had a bit of a watershed, in my life, when I read Scott Jenson's The Simplicity Shift[0]
It was written in Ye Time Beefore Ye iffowne, so mobile UI was really limited.
It's all about compromise. How to prioritize, and how to develop UI that was usable and affordable, while still maintaining some design integrity. It also talks a lot about how to work with others, and come up with compromises that work well.
[0] https://jenson.org/The-Simplicity-Shift.pdf (Downloads a PDF -short read).
Not necessarily.
Higher-level design often involves dissolving apparent tensions or opposites through layering or more sophisticated mechanisms, while preserving the benefits of both.
Example ->
Proposition: "Phew, we have to choose between convenience and security."
Naive design: "Let's find a watered-down compromise."
Good design: "Let's layer security on top of convenience by designing the system so users don't have to choose, or water either one down."
Great companies have a history of dissolving apparent contradictions under a single roof via good design.
Some might actually say that they found "a perfect compromise" where both use-cases are served well — this seems to be very much a linguistic preference today, regardless of the fact that "compromise" originally came from "making concessions".
Sometimes good design is that there is NO compromise.
The choices made that lead to the 737max disaster are a great example of what happens when NO isnt allowed to be an option.
"Design depends largely on constraints." - Charles Eames
Sure, but not all compromises are equal.
Creating a product and touting how secure it is while some jackass manager continually cuts the budget for security fixes? It’s self-defeating to throw up your hands and say “oh, we had to compromise.”
The reality is that decision-making is about power. If you are continually losing all the tradeoffs, that says all you need to know.
Sometimes power is in the hands of people who use it in ways that will tank the company, all while everyone else “compromises” so we all ride the express train to a failure.
So much equivocation that it makes this article unreadable.
Design is about limiting the actions available to guide the user towards a preferred set of outcomes. A good tool makes it easier to get good results and harder to get bad results.
Of course, what “good results” are depends entirely on what you’re trying to accomplish, which is why picking the right tool for the job is so important.
It kind of reminds me of this article which I think was also shared on HN couple of weeks ago.
https://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2010/02/if-your-product-is...
Not quite. Design is about optimization (of user experience, performance etc). Optimization implies constraints. Constraints are what made you think of "compromise".
Constraints != Compromise.
Compromise is stuff like what I'm going through, right now. The user needs to know that a set of locations on a map, can also be displayed as a sortable list, but the affordances for that access are not working with the overall design. It's extremely easy to add a button, but it messes with the screen layout.
We'll figure it out, but we can't ignore it. It's too important to our users, so we may have to make a graphical compromise. It's really tempting to think that "stupid users should know better," but that's a fairly destructive mindset.
Optimization implies constraints. But multiple targets implies compromise. How do you optimize for multiple measurements without compromise? You have to decide how to weight each against the other.
"How can I maximize my widgets-produced-in-six-months output given that I'm constrained by having $x budget?" - constraint that could give you a different solution than higher or lower budget.
"How can I maximize my widgets-produced-in-six months output AND my customer satisfaction given that I'm constrained by having $x budget" - now you have to compromise one or the other.
Here I'm talking about the physical design of how the widget is made as it's the first super-concrete example that popped to mind, but almost any sort of design operates in a similar multiple-goals world.
"Design is compromise" is basically saying that the thing you're optimizing is not at its optimum for all the variables separately which is often true, and therefore it is not a remarkable thing to say, and it is also not necessarily true.
To join in the pedantry: I always see optimization as being about compromise. Free wins that are strictly superior aren’t optimizations, they’re just doing it properly. Optimization is to make certain properties better, usually at the cost of others.
Optimization is not same as compromise. Optimization is about having freedom to tweak the parameters with the goal of maximzing somthing. Compromise focuses on lack of freedom. The terms focus on different areas of the overall situation. Design happens within the optimization context, which is shaped by the constraints.
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Even te business folks know this, at least those who read “The Innovator’s Dilemma”.
All the very successful-yet-failing companies were unable to understand these compromises, and each was overturned by a newcomer that could (usually due to necessity, of course)
Without the details of what the compromise is, this article is mostly tautological.
Of course, _some_ things require compromise. But many things do not. Assuming false dichotomies is a fairly common fallacy that no one is immune from.
The terminology can be confusing because in corporate speak being uncompromising can mean being opinionated. Not "we made no tradeoffs" but "we didn't split the difference."
The article means it as tradeoff rather than concession, so the argument is "to avoid design by committee you have to compromise on purpose."
Compromise is not the same as a trade-off. The assertion that they are the same throws this whole thing into question for me.
Well there's compromise that means multi-dimensional constraint optimization, and that's fine. But a lot of time what people mean by compromise is they compromised on cost, or on effort, or on attentiveness. Colloquially that's what people usually mean when they use the word with a negative connotation.
Every decision is a compromise, if it's not a compromise then it's not a decision just pure delusion or worse mis-engineering or perhaps there was never a decision there to begin with.
Design is one of the clearest examples, since it's filled with decisions about stuff, but just picking how you type which keyboard you use everything is a compromise. If perfect things existed everything and everyone would have naturally converged on it over enough time, but we rarely seem to see that happen outside monopolies built on network effects or extreme subsidisation.
Design is tradeoff, a similar thing I often observe is:
Creativity came after limitations
People often mistake thank freedom grants creativity
Compromise is usually seen negatively due to all those negotiation courses etc. You need a villian word to show your thing is better.
I think the hallmark of a good designer is knowing which things can be compromised and which things absolutely should never be. Different designers will have different opinions on what those things are.
I really like the article, as it resonates with me.
However, I also think it's a bit of a meta-commentary.
Ultimately it boils down to definition of the word "compromise", so a better article is one that establishes those semantics first.
Here’s an unpopular opinion. almost all ui customization should be buried in settings menus and not available as easy to do my mistake gestures.
The first time I want into this was when MS word would let you drag icons off the toolbar if you pressed slightly too long. suddenly your toolbar loses a feature because you accidentally dragged the icon off which was the gesture for removing the icon. Absolutely no one needed that shortcut gesture. People who wanted to customize, which is rare, could have dug into some customization setting. Instead, for every one person that wanted to edit their toolbar, 100 others got frustrated when their app stopped functioning
Unfortunately designed love these bad designs. Mac and iOS are full of them. I did some gesture just a few days ago that magically pulled the left shortcuts off the finder. Something I never wanted to do.
So many of my family member have lost the picture of their loved ones on their iPhone lock screen because of the stupid gesture to set it as it’s too easy to do by accident. Leaving as a settings option only would be much better.
Same with the charging clocks that appear and their stupid swipe to change. Several times a week, reaching for the phone when I wake up, the clock gets swapped even though I have a choice I want and then I have to go spend time putting it back. Worse, it’s not even intuitive because up/down change one thing and left/right change another. No user needs this shortcut. It probably exists so the clock designer can check all their designs. No fucks given what’s good for users. I’m sure they misinterpret their metrics as positive feedback
Compromise may occur during design, but it does not define design. Design is the intentional shaping of something to serve a purpose.
The problem isn't compromise.
It's pretending there isn't one.
Every product optimizes for something. The interesting question is what it chose to sacrifice.
Agreed. And making explicit that a trade off needs to be made tends to make people uncomfortable. They want to keep their options open.
Understanding this seems to be essential for leaders in general.
So the compromise in Obsidian is to throw everything else under the bus for aesthetics?
similar to what a person is capable of. we cant be good at everything, we're specialists; backend engineers, frontend developers, machine learning engineers, etc... as in design, it cannot appeal to every eye, being opinionated makes good design stand out.
Defaults are compromise, but design isn't.
the way i see it is that design actually never get treated what its meant to be treated as - a service to help make business more money..
Another way to put it: design is the outcome of an optimization against a given set of objectives and constraints. This would also help to keep track of the reasoning underlying changes in the design to provide an audit trail.
I like this phrasing.
(2018)
Design for the many vs design for the few vs design for one's self can be one of the issues.
Design for others can be different than needing to impose your design on others.
A very comprehensive and cognition-based work is the following by Henrik Gedenryd;
How Designers Work – Making Sense of Authentic Cognitive Activities - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352065
design is focus. engineering is compromise.
> When did the word “compromise” become vilified?
> Compromise is neither good nor bad, it’s something we do every day.
because compromise usually means "the wrong answer because an imbecile is necessary for consensus"
A benevolent and competent Authoritiarian is the best form of governance, everyone is just worried about the successor. But that nirvana period functions well due to no compromise and the right choices being made in quick succession.
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>Compromise is neither good nor bad, it’s something we do every day. It’s decision making. Prioritizing. Deciding that one thing is more important than another.
It's AI slop.
Edit: as pointed to me, it says 2018. I'd be damned. Guess that makes it merely part of the "LinkedIn post" training set pushing AI towards such style!
This essay was published in December 2018.
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