A big part of design is managing trade-offs. To crudely paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, you can please some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.

A simple trade-off between two things is like a seesaw: move one up and the other goes down. Think, say, of buying a new external hard drive — the trade-off there is between higher storage capacity and lower price. Or, say, how big to make a push button — bigger buttons are easier to hit, but there’s only so much space on a screen. Multivariate trade-offs are more complicated, but the basic gist is the same: you can’t have your cake and eat it too…