Taste vs. empathy

In the pursuit of the superpower that makes designers irreplaceable

It seems that we designers keep on searching for our superpower (or lifeline if you are less optimistic) in the “age of AI”. Depending on who you are asking, it’s either taste or empathy. I decided to stop sitting on the sidelines and to jump in and join the fight. I had to find the answer for myself and decided to bring you on the journey. Hang on tight, it will be a bumpy ride.

Where do we stand now?

Emotions run high and some feel strong about the one solution to our current predicament.

Designers that are strong visual designers say: taste will save us. It’s the last frontier in our fight with AI. With endless options generated by AI, someone will still need to decide which option is best. That would be us, with taste as our unfair advantage.

The UX designers among us, the ones that utilise user research as part of their design process say: empathy was and remains our strongest skill. We are only safe if we truly understand our users and validate our propositions. We need to appeal to the tastes of others, and we can do that only with empathy.

Zooming out, where we stand now is where we’ve always been. Nothing new. This is another version of “should designers code” or not. Or this is “dribbble designers” vs. UX designers all over again. Only difference — there is AI in the mix now and ”bootcamp designers” serving as villains. Whatever way you see it, we are fighting against ourselves all along. AI does not care. Bootcamp designers are simply people (designers), same as us, trying to feed their families and find fulfilment.

But back to the fight of taste vs. empathy… What do I feel (and think) about this dilemma?

With the risk of pissing off people from both camps, I think that both arguments have flaws.

Why having good taste is not enough

I like the taste argument. I find it appetising. Taste is surely one factor that will make our designs stand out from the AI slop. And I really believe that we designers have better taste than non designers (in general, with some exceptions). But I have a couple of problems with this argument.

1. Taste is subjective
Taste is having a good palate (and a good colour palette with it). It’s also about having good judgement. It’s knowing what’s beautiful and what’s not. These are 3 explanations already and somebody else might have a different interpretation. And we are just scratching the surface — discussing the meaning of the word. Continuing on, my taste is not the same as your taste. They can both be good, they can both be bad, depends on the perspective (or palate) of who you ask. There is no universal standard for what good taste is and the bar keeps on changing depending on trends. Lastly, taking us (designers) out of the picture, how does our taste resonates with our end users? What I feel is a good design and my peers agree on is not what our users might perceive as good. They might have a different palate.

One of the questions in the Stripe conversation with Jony Ive is on this topic (it was about the objectivity of beauty but taste was part of the answer). Sir Ive delivered a masterful take on the topic. TLDR: talking about craft and care is a much more objective conversation that talking about taste.

https://medium.com/media/c35f36b9426c6ad1545b0877f42c32fe/href

2. AI can learn taste
AI doesn’t have taste. It will never do, taste is a human thing. Does it matter? AI can be trained on the best designs out there or informed by the best tastemakers and spit out what someone might argue is great design. We are not there yet but it might happen. We are not safe from that, we cannot exclude it. It might not be able to create the most beautiful / stunning / modern landing page design but it might create a functional app screen or even a entire flow based on defined components. That won’t be enough for everything and everybody but it will be good enough for most. It won’t be design worth a Apple Design Award but it will still replace some of us despite how good our taste is.

3. Taste is used as an elitist argument
What I’ve seen around is that taste is used to speak with superiority and exclusivity and used as a derogatory term against others. And not only in the fight of designers vs. everyone else, it’s often also designers vs. designers. Its elitist and discouraging. It says: if you don’t have good visual design skills, there is no place for you here; you should find another job. That’s not fair. Designers with weaker visual design chops bring and will keep on bringing valuable things to the table. We should not use taste to look down on others in our community. And also, we should not use taste as an ego-feeding mechanism.

4. Your taste can be overruled
We often go against our tastes. That’s the reality of our world, unfortunately. You probably will have to use a design system created by someone else at some point and feel that some parts could’ve been designed differently. You might have a client (or a CEO) with different tastes than yours and cannot have the luxury to just abandon that client because of differences in tastes. In these cases, your taste does not matter that much.

5. Taste is mostly about craft and execution, less about interaction and certainly not about proposition
The taste argument absolutely makes sense when we are discussing care and craft of how our products look and are executed technically. But this is something that should come later to the table. It’s about “building the product right” and the narrower part of how the product looks and feels. It’s not about “building the right product”. Sure, it can look stunning, but does it make sense in the first place? That’s not in the domain of taste.

You can make an argument that taste is ever-encompassing and goes broader to the meaning of life and I am missing the point but that comes back to my initial point — taste is subjective.

Last words on taste
I am generalising here, but most of us designers are not normal, real people when you think about it. In a good way. But also in a bad way. We get excited about liquid glass. We get furious about liquid glass. We work and live in a tech bubble. Not the kind of stock market bubble that will burst (even though that’s not excluded), I am talking about something more like a dome. We spend 8+ hours in front of a computer, riding the waves of the internet and designing its future. That’s why digital twins and synthetic testing with AI are enticing for some of us. Also, why VR and AR seem like living the dream. No need for contact outside of our dome! Sweet! Buttttt. That’s the problem in the first place.

In the majority of cases, we are designing for people outside of our dome. Our audience does not comprise of other designers. Relying solely on our taste can lead us in a bad direction, away from reality.

Empathy to the rescue. Right? Right? Well…

Where empathy stops short

We are not our users; that has been well established. We have the curse of knowledge, and we are too emotionally invested. Hearing and feeling the emotions of someone else using our products can be a game-changer. Assuming we know is not the same. User research can give us the insights and the empathy we need to make our products match the real world. All good with that, right? Almost.

Whoa, whoa, let me explain before you shoot me down for saying that empathy is almost good.

1. You cannot feel (and know) everything
   Can we say we have empathy from doing a few usability interviews on our key flows? Can we truly know if there is product-market fit by doing a quick round of random guerrilla testing on the street? There will be many blind spots. Sure, you can fill in those gaps by dogfooding or even better, perhaps by doing continuous discovery. But not everyone has access to the resources needed to fully understand our users. Which brings me to my next point…
2. Real empathy is different from imagined empathy
   Coming up with a persona or doing a customer journey is a step towards understanding our users but it’s not real unless it’s validated. Designers can fall into the trap of thinking we know our customers and feel what they are feeling but it might be all based on a fantasy or incomplete information. Some research is better than no research, sure (with some exceptions). What I am saying is that we should not use the term empathy lightly unless we go deep, and not to do research only for ticking a box.
3. Empathy excludes the bigger context
   What about the bigger cultural momentum / zeitgeist? What about our industry, company, department and team context? What about the even bigger context (the state of the world)? There might be bigger forces in play into why someone feels a certain way and why something is not working or might work. Just looking at our customers is just looking in one direction. We need to understand the world more broadly.
4. Empathy might put us in a box
   Getting feedback won’t necessarily spark up innovation, it might just spark up patches and incremental improvements to problems. That’s all fine and we should definitely do it but we will only end up only with “faster horses”.
5. Empathy without acting on it is not useful
   You need to act (and act with taste) on your insights. We can feel and present a pain point. But we need to design and ship something to address it. Insight without design to address it is just a bunch of words in a power point or a customer journey serving as expensive decoration on a wall in our office. We cannot rely solely on empathy unless we are specialised in UX Research or Service Design alone. Empathy might be the moat of researchers, not of designers.

Last words on empathy
If we address the problems highlighted above, we will be very closely attuned to reality. We will know what needs solving and what innovation will make sense so we can go beyond the products we have today. AI cannot replicate this, no matter how deep its research will go. But this still leaves out execution out of the conversation. We should aim for care instead of empathy because: care = empathy + action.

Repeat after me: care = empathy + action.

Let’s get real

I think we keep on missing the thing that’s right in front of us. Reality.

To be precise, I think that the only thing that will keep us safe is: a healthy dose of reality. Optimistically, it won’t only save our jobs but it will make us even more valuable than we are now.

We are not too real and too honest with ourselves at times. And we have a narrow perspective, coming from our personal experiences, career and current position. We can very much expand it and improve on this.

Empathy and taste are both essential ingredients to having a healthy dose of reality. We need to get real and understand that we are not our users and our amazing taste and intuition won’t save us alone. On the other side, realising that we only did the first parts of the design thinking methodology while our designs are subpar is another wake up / shake up we need to have. Taste and execution matter tremendously. Design thinking is nothing without design doing.

So it seems that empathy needs taste and taste needs empathy. In essence, we need research and understanding and we need execution to the highest standards. That’s it right? No. Few more essential things are missing to complete the puzzle and get real…

The missing pieces

We as designers bring much more to the table without realising. We are complex multilayered humans. And that’s what exactly makes us irreplaceable.

What’s missing for us to have a healthy dose of reality (and keep on being irreplaceable):

1. Considering outcomes
   When designing, we have to consider business goals as part of our process. Our work needs to be aligned with that. It’s not only us and users in the picture, there is also the business or client that pays us. And while taste can be subjective and we might have gaps in our empathy, the numbers don’t lie. Reality is objective – it either works or not, our products either convert or not. Building a optimal flow is not subjective. We can optimise business metrics but also UX metrics (a very useful cheat sheet for this can be found here). Does it resonate, is it logical or nonsensical proposition, will someone buy it or use it? The ultimate test is in the data (and in the money).
2. Understanding of our business context
   We need to be mindful of the part of our reality where our products are getting built — the teams, processes and culture of our business. This business context will have an impact on whether our organisation is supporting for empathy and taste as part of the process. We will need to prioritise in the face of limited resources. Even in a world of boosted productivity with AI, we will still need to make trade offs and compromises just as we do daily now. Part of the business context are other people as well, which leads me to the next point…
3. Having soft skills
   Unless you‘re an entrepreneur doing everything by yourself, you will be working with other humans. We need to understand and empathise with them as well, not only with our users. And we need to respect the tastes (or arguments) of others and find compromises. Being easy to work with might be perceived as a weakness by some but I am sure that it can be one of our strongest skills in our toolbox.
4. Being able to think big
   Having a healthy dose of reality does not mean you cannot think and dream big! You need to have one foot in reality while the other one is in the future. We have to have a healthy dose of delusion as well. The strategic part of our work should be based on insight (and empathy) mixed with intuition, boldness and risk. Oh yes and at the same time also be beautiful, simple, executed with taste. Our visions should inspire a team or an entire company to get up and do 180 degrees turn or proceed in the same direction 10 times faster. In order to do that, we need the next skill…
5. Having strong presentation and sales skills
   We need the presentation and storytelling skills of the best sales people in the trade. The people that will captivate an audience and convince them that what we are selling is the best deal in the world. This will make everything easier, ranging from convincing our stakeholders on a small design change all the way up to a vision that requires the entire company to shift direction. This will make people go with our proposal (and taste), it will make people feel what we feel and get the insights we have. Without these skills, the loudest (and most paid) voice in the room will win, no doubt.
6. Synthesising everything
   We are collage makers, assemblers, making sense of it all, taking it all in, blending it til it works and looks good. This point is all about taking everything from above and making something out of it. We should be able to zoom in on the details, as well as zoom out to the big picture and make sure it all clicks. Not a lot of people outside of us designers can do that.
7. Be adaptable
   Kind of like a pre-requisite to all of this is that we should be humble and be adaptable. We need to keep on learning, especially if we miss some of the pieces of the puzzle I mention here. We might be strong in visual design but fall short in strategic thinking. How can you improve on that? As with everything else — hard work is usually the answer. Another example: our toolbox and processes are changing with AI. How can you pick up new tools and skills to be relevant when even our job roles are shifting? We work in the tech industry and tech is ever evolving. It won’t stop with AI. You should be evolving and adapting as well while being grounded in what has always worked and always will.

In conclusion

Reality asks boring, decisive questions: Does this work outside our bubble? Will someone pick it, pay for it, return to it? Can our team actually build, launch, and support it? If the answer is no, immaculate taste and immaculate research don’t matter.

Design isn’t saved by taste or by empathy alone. It’s saved by contact with reality — the stuff you can’t fake or generate with AI: outcomes, constraints, choices, soft skills, adaptability and the complicated synthesis of it all.

Design is also saved by us lifting the design craft and the design community up. By being kind, respectful and helpful to each other. By understanding more than just our own perspective. Reality is more complicated than that.

Peace out.

Taste vs. empathy was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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