The Designer's Quality Dilemma
Depth, speed or number of projects—choose two.
Let's acknowledge a simple truth: you probably can't do a ton of projects at once, turn them all around super quickly and go incredibly deep on the problem and scope if you want the final design work to be fucking amazing. There is only so much time in a day. You really can only choose two of those three constraints at any given moment while still doing the work well. So which two do you choose? This is the Designer's Dilemma when it comes to quality.
The Design Quality Triangle
Think of the Designer's Quality Dilemma as being represented by a triangle with three points. Let's call it the Design Quality Triangle. The triangle as a whole represents the quality of your work, and each point represents where you can put your energy as an individual designer. The only problem is you don't have enough energy for all three points. You can only really choose two at any given moment. Which two constraints you choose determines the quality of your or your team's work. If you are not choosing deliberately, you could be holding yourself or your team back.
The dilemma and the Design Quality Triangle aren't breaking new ground but stand on the shoulders of similar frameworks in other disciplines. They are an adaptation of the Project Management Triangle, which states that for managing a project, "The quality of work is constrained by the project's budget, deadlines, and scope (features)...Changes in one constraint necessitate changes in others to compensate, or quality will suffer."
The Project Management Triangle reflects the tradeoffs inherent in project management, yes, but it also reflects the tradeoffs inherent in design. As they say, "Good, fast, cheap. Choose two." There are a lot of different ways the push and pull of these constraints can show up in your work.
Here is an example: do you ever feel like you are doing too much and don't feel like you are "breaking through" to understand the problem? There is a chance you are not just executing on too many projects but also too quick to allow yourself to go deep enough into the problem or details.
Skill and experience can help you potentially understand and solve challenging problems faster, but that doesn't eliminate your risk of doing too many things and doing them all too quickly to be successful.
Or are you becoming a bottleneck for your team or engineers? Maybe you are going too deep in scope (potentially a good thing in isolation) but on too many projects at once. As a result, they are all inching along at a much slower pace than with a lighter workload.
Or maybe you are not doing enough things well. That is, you're going deep on the problem and turning it around efficiently, but you are working on a low number of projects to do so. One project at a time won't keep the team moving if the number of engineers dwarfs the number of designers, no matter how efficiently you do it. They need more from you or more of you to do the work.
Lastly, trying to do all three means you spread yourself too thin and end up failing at all three. Your quality still suffers.
If you look around, most problems you face in the design workplace are affected in some way by the push and pull of these three choices, these constraints, against each other.
The Right Triangle
So, which two of the three constraints do you choose to focus your energy on? If you're looking for the "right" choice, you've come to the wrong place. There isn't one. Or, said another way, it depends. On what does it depend, you ask? Well, the circumstance.
For example, are you a small, scrappy startup with an unproven product? A quick turnaround time and a high number of test initiatives allow you to learn quickly from the market before spending too much time going in any one direction. The speed with which you get answers to critical questions about your business or product is your strategic edge. You don't want to end up building something great that no one wants or that isn't going to materially change your business before your runway disappears.
Or maybe you have been treating all projects with the same care and depth, and it's slowing you down. You could choose one critical or high-risk initiative to do by the letter while turning around many smaller scope initiatives more quickly. The sacrifice on depth for the projects you turn around more rapidly would give those more crucial initiatives some breathing room to be handled with care.
Or maybe there are not enough designers for the size of your product or engineering teams. You need to hire your way out of the situation, so each designer can do a manageable number of projects with care, but make sure there is still enough total output.
So, you advocate for hiring another designer. But, until you find that person to hire, you may need to agree to make some sacrifices: fewer projects, smaller scope projects, or a longer timeline for completion.
There isn't a "right" choice. There are several combinations & the right one is the best combination for the problem at hand. Treat each triangle corner as a lever to adjust to better meet your current goals. And because plans do change, don't be afraid to adapt your levers with along them. This shouldn't be a one-time strategy but a lens for optimizing for a moment in time.
The Right Triangle for the Moment
So, what is the right choice for this moment in time? Well, it depends on where you are at and where you want to go!
Ask yourself or your team the below four questions to determine what your starting point is and which triangle formation to strive for instead:
In what situation do you find yourself? E.g., "It feels like we haven't been solving the core problem for our users—it's like we're not making it better but just different."
What two points on the Design Quality Triangle best represent the reason for your answer to #1, and why? E.g., Number of Projects & Speed of Execution. It seems like we're doing a lot of work right now, each designer has 3-4 projects in flight, and we are not spending the time to focus enough on the 'why' for the problem we want to solve...I can't remember the last time we did user research..."
What is your desired end goal? E.g., "Each project focuses more on nailing the problem statement at the beginning of a project, and gives more time to validate concepts with usability research, in every case that it is applicable."
How do you have to adjust your Design Quality Triangle to achieve the results you want? E.g., "Scope/Depth of Work & Speed of Execution. To spend more time on kickoff & research, let's sacrifice the number of projects we are doing and give each project more padding. This will decrease our output numbers relatively in Q1, so I will work with our Product & Engineering teams to prioritize and advocate hiring one additional designer this quarter. This way, we can recover our original volume of output in Q2 without sacrificing quality."
The gap between step two and four is the difference between where you are and where you want to be. Now you have a plan, a way of recognizing when it is or isn't happening, and a way of speaking about it.
"Articulation heightens clarity." —Eva Hoffman.
Once you verbalize where you think you are relative to where you want to be, you are one step closer to doing something about it. You can then write an action plan to bridge the gap.
Frameworks Are A Means
The Design Quality Triangle and the Designer's Quality Dilemma embedded in its design, like most frameworks for understanding, aren't perfect. They shouldn't be considered dogma. There are sometimes other factors at play. But, they are a means to better outcomes. They can be useful frameworks to start thinking about and articulating to you, your team, or your stakeholders how to better optimize your time and resources. It can help visualize your advocacy for new hires. Use it in whatever way you find it useful. And don't when it's not.
Either way, the deliberate choosing of your constraints equals the deliberate choosing of your potential outcomes.
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