Cost Does Not Equal Return
We are obsessed with data.
And it is our nature to make sense of it and relate pattern that data gives us.
When we succeeded, we love to award our action towards judgement as much as we love to blame it when we fail.
Take building a resort for example.
When it starts, there is no margin of safety.
Along the way, your resort gets return and margin of safety starts to build up.
And after a period of time, it starts to lose money.
It is often deemed that the amount your sales then can fall before the break even point so that you don't reach below the margin of safety.
But a lost is a lost.
So the next resort that you built, you try to reduce the time to break even and the margin of safety can be built up faster by lowering the initial start-up cost.
But unfortunately, start-up cost does not justify return in proportion with type of design and customer that you will be getting.
An expensive design don't guarantee good return, so does a cheap design.
Analyze sales report, annual report, behavior and other statistical patterns that you want, and you can have fun with it.
In the end, the objective values are to do within means, change and uncertainties.
Judgement towards things within our knowledge can turn into good implementation, unless what we know is false.
Judgement towards things we do not know is mostly speculation.
We love to associate emotional meaning to statistic.
As complex as statistic can mean to us, the takeaway here is rather simple:
Cost does not equal return.
It is as simple as the answer for complex question like how to do good design, because the only answer is as vague as to do honest design.
So take bad interpretation attempt out of your head and make improvisation of your creation towards meaningful way of things.