Very well written post with some great formatting/pacing, but I think they’re overselling the novelty of the central point for blog reasons. To cut to the quick:<p><pre><code> Taste is some combination of design, user experience, and emotional resonance that defines how a product connects with people and aligns with their values and identity.
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That definition certainly captures taste, but I think it’s far too large of a net. UX and design <i>are</i> engineering, specifically the field of HCI in this case, and it’s been important at least since Google beat Yahoo with its minimalist UX.<p>In other, more direct words: at no point in Silicon Valley could you “hire the best engineers and stand back”, YC has been emphasizing ephemeral stuff like PMF, team culture, and user-centric design since the jump.<p>I’m quite biased, but I think the question of “what is taste” needs to draw on philosophy for answers, at the very least to put a new theory in opposition to the old ones. There’s literally 2000y of aesthetics work in western philosophy to draw from, after all!<p>As a Kantian, the core of the answer is simple: beauty is unmotivated pleasure endowed with a sense of objective validity. See <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-aesthetics/#WhatJudgBeau" rel="nofollow">https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-aesthetics/#WhatJudg...</a> This helps us with the current question in a couple ways.<p>First, it teaches us why UX wouldn’t normally be considered aesthetic, since it’s often quite instrumental.<p>More importantly, it reminds us that it’s not enough to appeal to some particular audience’s particular tastes, but that you must also present something they see as <i>objectively</i> or <i>universally</i> beautiful. Hacker types love their complex toolbars and cottagecore Etsy witches love their goofy fonts, but I think both groups recognize those preferences as personal. A truly tasteful website is one that brings joys in the little universal ways — the “juice”, as I recently learned it’s called in the game design world: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_feel" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_feel</a><p>Thanks for posting! Definitely thought provoking, and I absolutely agree with the motivating point, if not the phrasing.