I'm borrowing shamelessly from an essay by D. Miessler about efficiency in security design for user products by generalizing to the quality -- in the broadest sense -- of a product. That is to say: quality as evaluated by a user (quality is in the eye of the beholder, as it were)
And, I might observe that the principle explained below corresponds closely with the Agile idea of "enough, but not more than enough"
The Efficient Quality Principle
1. The quality baseline of an offering or system faces continuous downward pressure [i.e. less quality demanded] coming from customer excitement about, or reliance on, the offering in question.
2. The baseline for an offering’s quality will be set at the point at which people will not stop using the offering because it’s quality is not pristine.
3. The better the offering is, the lower the quality baseline can be without losing customers.
In other words, the way we know something has the “right” amount of quality built in is when people just keep using it. People use these offerings or systems because the value they provide massively outweighs the quality lapses in user's minds.
The moment enough people stop using something due to quality being too bad, the baseline goes up. And not before.
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