Speed is not quality

There’s a seductive idea going around that speed is the new quality. Ship fast, test everything, let the data decide. In the age of AI, when you can generate a thousand variations in the time it used to take to make one, this seems not just reasonable but obvious. Why spend weeks agonizing over details when you could be learning from real users?

I think this is mostly right, but dangerously incomplete.

The people saying “speed is quality” are reacting to something real: the old world of design-by-committee, where products died in conference rooms before anyone outside the building ever saw them. They’re right that you learn more from shipping than from planning. They’re right that perfect is the enemy of good. They’re right that many decisions don’t matter as much as we think they do.

But there’s a category error happening. They’re conflating the process of finding what matters with the act of making it matter.

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The best designers I know are incredibly fast, until they’re not. They’ll blast through a dozen concepts in an afternoon, testing wildly different approaches with a speed that looks almost careless. But then they find something. Some small moment in the experience that could be special. And suddenly they’re spending two days on an animation that 90% of users won’t consciously notice.

This looks inconsistent if you think quality is uniformly distributed. But quality isn’t uniformly distributed. It’s spiky. Most decisions genuinely don’t matter. A few matter enormously. And this is the part that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t felt it. You often don’t know which is which until you’re deep in the details.

The craft is knowing where to look.

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What’s happened in the AI age is that the cost of “good enough” has collapsed. You can generate competent marketing copy, decent UI designs, functional code. The floor has risen dramatically. This is genuinely miraculous, I’m not being sarcastic. It’s made many things possible that weren’t before.

But here’s what hasn’t changed: the distance between good enough and magical is still exactly as far as it always was. Maybe further, actually, because now everyone can reach good enough.

That distance is measured in caring.

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I was talking to a designer recently who was working on a file upload interface. She’d shipped the basic functionality quickly, drag and drop, progress indicator, the basic stuff. It worked fine. But she kept thinking about the moment right after you drop a file. That little pause before the upload starts. Most people just show a spinner.

She added this tiny moment where the file kind of “settles” into place with a subtle bounce, like it has weight. Then the progress bar grows out from underneath it, as if the file is sitting on a surface that’s filling up with data. The whole thing takes maybe 800 milliseconds.

When I asked her why she spent extra hours on this, she said something interesting: “I wanted uploading a file to feel like placing a physical object on a desk, not like sending data into the void.”

She nailed it. She understood that in order to design something beyond pure functionality, she needed to go the extra mile.

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You can’t A/B test your way to this kind of quality. I mean, you probably could measure that users with the fancy animation have slightly higher completion rates or whatever. But that’s backwards. The point isn’t that it performs better. The point is that someone cared enough to make it delightful.