How bad is “gold plating” in UX?
When too much quality hurts.
Last night, I was spending an excessive amount of time trying to make a spreadsheet look cool. I had an excuse to do that. Since I’m often going through lots of spreadsheets done by other people in the company years ago, reconstructing the logic behind it always proves challenging. Why is that cell red while the other one is orange? Is there a difference between red text and a red cell? Questionable color coding, ambiguous micro-copy, and mysterious formatting are what I have to deal with on a daily basis.
It doesn’t just bother me as a designer, it also makes everyone lose a lot of time trying to figure out what something means. So my goal with the pretty spreadsheet was making sure that it would have been easy to understand equally now and in ten years, by me and anyone else. Internal UX, if you will.
And yet, although my initial idea was good, I ended up changing colors and formatting way too many times, making it unnecessarily visually appealing. I even imported the brand’s colors, and this was a file no one was meant to see outside of the company. In short, I was gold-plating.
What is gold plating?
Gold plating is a term that comes from project management, and it means working on a project or task past the point of diminishing returns. Because beyond a certain point any additional effort has a decreasing effect on quality, a project should aim at having the best quality-per-cost ratio. Gold plating is anything beyond that point.
Gold plating is what happens when you are so much into your own work that you start adding extra features and polishing it, thinking you’re improving it, although you really should be doing something else. It is generally considered a bad practice for a number of reasons, among which:
- There’s no guarantee that the extra work will yield any return on the investment, and it might even impact the returns negatively if the quality is unwanted by the client or the user. More on that later.
- You will get emotionally involved with your creation, and you will be reluctant to let it go if testing reveals that it needs to change. It’s harder to change something when you invested a lot of time in it.
- It’s a way in for Scope Creep. This is another concept in project management that indicates when a project grows uncontrollably beyond the predefined scope. This usually means exceeding the budget or development time.
The reason why I think it’s interesting to examine gold plating in relation to design is that designers are usually valued by the quality of their work. Many designer job postings ask you to “advocate for design in the company” and to create “pixel-perfect designs”, which sounds like you should always be pushing to improve the design, regardless of whether it is useful for the business objectives.
Since design school, it’s ingrained in our heads that we should always strive for quality no matter what. Let’s say it. No one wants to do crappy work, because we tie the quality of our work to our value as designers.
Worse is better
However, there are countless cases where quality is not only not needed, but undesirable. Imagine a company launching a new product. The very first users that will come in contact with the product will likely be early adopters. Early adopters don’t want quality, they want to be the first. In fact, to them, quality is a sign that many people are already using the product and that it won’t give them a competitive advantage. Instead, they dig sketchy, experimental products. In this case, polishing the product for a mainstream audience would have a negative return.
A lot of students — including myself — come out of design school overthinking every single UX choice, always striving to make every design extra clear to every possible type of user. Truth is, with this approach, you’re again just assuming what users wouldn’t understand, or that users or clients will like stuff the way you make it.
Usability heuristics are all important, but some more than others, depending on the type of project. Some heuristics will invalidate the whole existence of the product you’re building, some will increase the conversion rate or user retention, and some will have no monetary effect.
For example, if you’re building an internal tool for a client, it’s unlikely that the client will pay extra for an attractive, pleasant design. Employees will have to use it — no need to convert them. They will probably become quite skilled at using it, so it doesn’t have to be super easy to learn either. Instead, it should enable them to reach a higher level of productivity once they’ve learned to use it (the Nielsen Norman Group calls this efficiency of the ultimate plateau). Cramming a lot of information on one page might actually be more convenient than a minimalistic design.
On the other hand, the client would probably be glad to invest in preventing human error, if errors cost money. In order to figure out what is the priority for your product and avoid waste, you need to start with a crappy product, as counter-intuitive as it sounds. As Eric Ries says in his book The Lean Startup:
If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.
Lean thinking and Lean UX
The purpose of the Lean approach is exactly that of eliminating waste by iterating fast and testing super early in the process, in order to get to know the customer as soon as possible.
Lean UX is the application of Lean thinking in UX design. The core concept of it is that since you iterate so fast, you don’t have time to design UX the way you would based on a set of predetermined requirements. In fact, the whole point of Lean is that you don’t know what requirements will work for you, and you need to figure them out.
Designers, being more prone to perfectionism, are more at risk of gold plating and waste. Having high visual sensitivity is both a blessing and a curse. It’s easy to tilt your head and squint your eyes too many times. Although gold plating is a human tendency and can’t be completely prevented, Lean thinking offers a partial solution to this problem. The real value of the design can only be determined as a function of the customer needs.
This relates to another point that was brought up by other writers on Medium, which is that of KPI-centered design. Everyone in the academic world stresses the importance of human-centered design, but in reality, companies measure the efficacy of their product design through metrics that benefit their business objectives.
It is a pretty vast topic that touches on many different fields, and I barely scratched the surface. Here’s some material if you want to go more in-depth:
- The Lean Startup by Eric Ries is a great way to start getting involved with Lean product development and it provides a lot of references on its own.
- Lean UX — Getting Out Of The Deliverables Business, an article by Jeff Gothelf on Smashing Magazine.
- Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience, a book also by Jeff Gothelf to go more in detail into Lean UX.
- Lastly, you can read about gold plating on Wikipedia and go from there, if you want to fall into the rabbit hole of the quality-vs-time debate.
