What is it that data analysts want? Acknowledging that data quality is a subjective concept, we develop a framework to evaluate the quality of differentially private synthetic data from an applied researcher’s perspective. Data quality can be measured along two dimensions. First, quality of synthetic data can be evaluated against training data or against an underlying population. Second, the quality of synthetic data depends on general similarity of distributions or specific tasks such as inference or prediction. It is clear that accommodating all goals at once is a formidable challenge. We invite the academic community to jointly advance the privacy-quality frontier.