Tradeoffs In Design

4 min readSep 6, 2020

An image asking you to choose 2 options out of 3 available, which you would choose and why? — Background Image used here by Paweł Czerwiński

What are tradeoffs

When you are designing, you are making a design decision. Every time you are making a decision, you are compromising on something else. It is up to you to decide what is mandatory, what is optional, and what is to keep out.

Every team in an organization is dealing with the tradeoff. Eg: Engineers are deciding internally how to improve the code. What they can change in a given period given the resources they have.

Tradeoffs in design

While designing, you are going through so many alternatives ideas, solutions and it can be difficult to decide which should you select and which should be left out and why.

To make this decision easier, you are looking at different metrics to make a decision. In a project, the three most common metrics are time, scope, and cost. You need to negotiate on these metrics.

Scope: Everything is possible but not everything should be in scope. You cannot fix all the problems at once and not all the problems need to be solved immediately. You need to make a decision on which problem to tackle first and how to scope that out for incremental updates.

Time: Is the time sufficient to build this feature? If it is twice useful and it takes 10 times longer, is it worth it?

Cost: How much you have to spend to build the feature? What is the investment and will it yield the return we are hoping to achieve?

Tradeoffs also depends on priorities — it may be done to attain the business goal, sometimes for technical limitations, sometimes to put user needs above others.

Tradeoffs are more than making a decision

The one important aspect of deciding tradeoff is to reach consensus and alignment with the people you work with. You need to get stakeholders and cross-functional team members to agree on and prioritize various features of the project.

How can you decide tradeoff

There might be a lot of factors that might affect the project. Put different factors that might affect the project into themes and patterns. Now you choose a few and decided the priority based on these factors.

Sticky notes sorted in patters which fall under — project factors, features and user needs as can be seen in NNgroup article — Image Credit (https://www.nngroup.com/videos/tradeoff-scale-ux-priority/)

Analyze trade-offs between these factors in an analytic way. Don’t let emotions get you carried away. You should explain the rationale behind your decisions. You should document not only the decision you made also state the reasoning behind it.

You need to consider the constraints and consequences. What are the constraints of each of these choices? What is this going to prevent you from doing? How is this going to be made and what will be the consequence of that?

You should also consider the cost and benefits of each factor. Use A/B tests to mitigate any risk you might have. When prioritizing, think about future versions as well as old ones (eg: If you do this first, you might know more or reduce risk).

Few tradeoffs questions to consider

Is it worth the work? Is it worth solving the problem?
What is the ROI of solving this problem? Consider the cost and benefit of each option.
If it is more useful and it takes 10 times longer, is it worth solving it?
Is doing this first help us know more about the future and reduce risk?
Business priorities (customer retention, conversion, growth)
Technical (security, no API, scalability)

When a feature needs to be built, for that feature you need to see all the tradeoffs across different departments. Eg: Security (technical) vs ease of user (product/design)