Design is compromise(stephango.com) |
Design is compromise(stephango.com) |
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 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Can%27t_Always_Get_What_Yo...
...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!"
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.
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.
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
The article means it as tradeoff rather than concession, so the argument is "to avoid design by committee you have to compromise on purpose."
There might be a deeper point being communicated, not sure, but I see no issue here.
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.
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.
"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 for others can be different than needing to impose your design on others.
It's pretending there isn't one.
Every product optimizes for something. The interesting question is what it chose to sacrifice.
Understanding this seems to be essential for leaders in general.
How Designers Work – Making Sense of Authentic Cognitive Activities - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352065
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.
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.
If the intent was to share an interesting fact about the origin of the word, then that would be something I'd find interesting, but quite often tone ends up mattering as much as content, and the way you've phrased it doesn't make it clear at all that's what your intent is rather than sounding like you're saying that everyone here is ignorant except you. Whether or not that's accurate (and for the record I don't think it is, since I tend to consider a definition that doesn't fit what people actually mean as irrelevant), generally convincing people that they're wrong requires a lot of careful communication. At the end of the day, you have to decide whether you're commenting because you genuinely want to convince people of something or just because you want to say it regardless of the outcome; if you're motivated by the former, then how people react to your tone is tautologically the measure of whether you need to change it or not, and if you're motivated by the latter, you're going to have to accept that downvotes are an inevitable consequence when you're saying things that people don't agree with in a way that they don't like.