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.

> 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!"

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

I like this phrasing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

This essay was published in December 2018.

True dilemmas are rare though, often it just means insufficient investigation of your requirements

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Would you say... You have arrived at a compromise? Ba-dum-tshh!

I wasn't one of the ones who downvoted you (I didn't land on this thread until after all of this discussion about downvotes had happened), but I also don't really understand what you think is valuable about the idea you presented. At best, it comes across like semantics about what the correct definition for something is (which seems to come from a prescriptivist take that disagrees with the overwhelmingly common usage of the word, so it's not surprising that it's not being received well).

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.

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.

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.

> 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

I mean, sure, if you think that there's literally no way for you to improve how you communicate to more effectively convey your ideas, then yes it's because of the other people and not something you can address. One person getting the point isn't a sign that everyone else is going to though. If your goal is to be persuasive to enough people that you don't need to risk downvotes though, you might find more success from looking closer at why you failed to get the outcome you want than from trying to justify it as not your fault. As I said though, I don't have any agenda here; I didn't downvote you, and if you're happier with the outcomes you're getting rather than being open to trying to communicate differently, it doesn't bother me! Given that you seemed upset about the downvotes though, it seemed like maybe you genuinely wanted to learn what might have caused them so you could try to avoid it in the future, so I was offering what seemed like the reason to me.

> 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

Not quite, I'm saying that it's not really a secret (at least not intentionally); it's just that common definition that most people understand the word to mean includes both win/win and lose/lose. It's totally understandable that this might not be your understanding of the word, since there's no way to really find out which words you might not understand the same way everyone else does, short of looking up every single word in a recent dictionary, which isn't a particularly fun way to spend time.

You are obviously using a newly defined phrase "mutual preference" which does not seem to be familiar to most people and a quick search does not bring anything of value for me (there is "mutual preference method", but that's about matching people to one another).

I — among others — believe that "sweet spot", "balanced", "trade-off" and even "compromise" are good enough words to describe a solution that achieves good outcomes for multiple competing goals (not just people), and I really believe that whether any of those is negative is in the eye (ear) of the beholder.

If you are instead claiming that there are no competing goals when you are eg. building a product, you might be looking only at very simple products (though I have a hard time imagining a product so simple there are at least not two goals in tension — eg. a knife and toothpick both need to balance sharpness and safety).

Does not your entire comment rely on a very particular ("original") definition of the word compromise — so, uhm, on "choice of words"?

It's fine, I got a conversation, that's all I wanted. Thank you, by the way. No, I won't modify my behavior. :)

Re: the definition, that's exactly what I said in the first place! "Often people don't make the distinction and call both things compromises", I said. I'm promoting making the distinction because I think it matters, a lot.

But those describe a different thing. I use "mutual preference" carefully. Dale Carnegie described this in 1936. I don't remember what term he used for it, if any. But instead of any trade-off, which I will repeat is a lose-lose because both sides settle for an inferior version of their idea, you create a new idea which satisfies the spirit of what both sides wanted - quite likely satisfies it better than what they first thought of - and is quite different in nature.

This is of course difficult to do, and you may give up and compromise instead. Sometimes that's understandable. It is however worse.

You're saying that a definition of compromise as "concessions on both sides" is strange and original, really? Did you understand the word compromise to mean a process to which creativity is crucial, and not concessions? I'd be very surprised (and pleased) if that was how you understood the word already. It's not how it's portrayed in the article.

That’s fairly classic CBDM (Consensus-Based Decision-Making).

Sometimes, it works nicely; other times, you end up with The Abilene Paradox[0].

Group creativity is a crapshoot. Sometimes, lots of crap shoots out.

Ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox

I would say that creativity is crucial to a good, working compromise. You do not need much creativity for a bad one (it sounds like you are focusing on that type of compromise).

I am not saying that the "original" definition of "concessions on both sides" is strange at all though — merely that this was the original (first) meaning of the word, but that it is today used for both indicating a successful idea that meets multiple goals when they are re-evaluated by their spirit, and a set of concessions that meet some but not all of the original goals or their spirit.

I do not think anyone disagrees with that — ideally, you get two ideas to meet and satisfy them completely (or two people to agree on the solution working for them both). But even a new idea comes from someone, and you might still have egos to deal with where one party won't budge if it wasn't from them.

But what people are stating (me included) is that in majority of cases, you are actually dealing with conflicting goals and outcomes so it is really the art of making decisions that allow you to do a good creative job within a set of needs.

So it is really more of a "yes, and" to you — with nobody disputing that you should first try to find a solution that meets multiple goals, people are finding that it's not just hard, but sometimes impossible to do so and really talking about this what we perceive to be "majority of our work" in operating within this "yes, and..." zone.

This is also why we have so many different tools for superficially the same job: from knives, forks and spoons (and yes, a spork ;-)), over accounting software, cars, shoes, clothes, phone sizes and underlying operating systems...

I mean, it'd be great if there was one tool I could use to eat my hot soup on a cold day, and shovel snow in the street, but... Yes, one could eg. imagine a way where one thing could do both where it's about eating a soup and cleaning snow (perhaps a straw-based system that sprinkles hot soup onto snow while having a junction to feed me too? :)), but the OP was using "compromise" in a way where he splits the two needs and focuses only on one.

And while this example seems far-fetched, it is not unusual in the world of software :)