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.
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.
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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
I disagree, we are faced with "true dilemmas" every day numerous times, not even limited to work and creation — e.g. you might be going to a shop to buy crackers, and while you have a preferred brand, a new entrant might be half the price — do you use the opportunity to try the new one, or get the tried-and-true?
These types of things are ubiquitous when designing and building products — how do you communicate to your users, how much you communicate and how much you automate, how do you target slightly different users (new customer vs old one used to old patterns in your product), what use-case is the most important one (by customer type, customer numbers, and how commonly they do something...), etc.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
"Design depends largely on constraints." - Charles Eames
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.
Defaults are compromise, but design isn't.
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.
> 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.
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.
Compromise is one technique in doing optimization: as someone mentioned, you could be maximizing a known good property of your product with no ill-effects on any other property. But you might be optimizing an overall experience for two needs, which means balancing potentially conflicting goals, and choosing imperfect solution for both — some might use the term "compromise" for this.
Other terms are in use, like "balance" or "trade-off" from the OP or... But I believe the message is clear in that the OP believes majority of design is about balancing opposing forces and their tension and they call that compromising.
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.
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.
I like this phrasing.
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.
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..
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.
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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.
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.
> 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
Eh, alright, I agree. That's pretty much what I said, there's a place for compromise, because some disagreements are intractable, but compromise is suboptimal.
Ohohoho. I'd say this is actually an example of a third thing, where it turns out that you didn't even disagree, except in choice of words.
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.
He of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I also spotted it in How to Win Friends and Influence People. I guess it is the kind of idea found in self-help books. :/ I still think it's a good one all the same.
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.
No it isn't (and no it isn't). I only complain because I hand you all what I believe to be a valuable idea and then somebody reacts by silently making a rude finger gesture at it, and they don't even say why, that's the irritating part.
So, what are you saying about framing everything as binary? That actually sounds like what I'm saying is bad: to be uncreative and stubborn and reject any new idea on principle, a Not Invented Here sort of mindset, even if when you thought about it you'd prefer the new idea. That stubbornness is what leads to difference-splitting.
Oh, so people are annoyed at me because they aren't getting the point, maybe? The commenter who mentioned Steven Covey knew what I was talking about. It's not just semantics ... or, wait a minute, are you saying everybody secretly knows that what they call compromises ought ideally to be creative mutual preferences, and not involve either or both of the parties having to put up with things and having their goals degraded? Maybe you all know that already. That would be excellent, if it's commonly understood.
It's a valuable idea, because otherwise what you get is an established habit of bad resolutions to disputes, where it becomes normal and is seen as virtuous for everybody to settle for half-measures. The article, which is very short, might be promoting that mindset, for all I can tell. In fact it clearly states it:
> The more you tip the scale on one side, the weaker something else will be. That’s okay!
No, it isn't okay, and that's a shitty zero-sum uncreative way to view the world.