Universal Taste

Taste is Dynamic

Almost everyone can relate to some variation of the following experience: You hear a song at home or by yourself, and you love it a lot. You think it’s really cool, and you can’t wait to share it with somebody. When you finally get a chance to, you find that, in the moment that you’re sharing it with another person (being there in the room with them and sort of being aware of their perspective), it changes the way that you view the song from how you perceived it when you were alone.

It’s interesting because it’s not intuitive that this would be true, even though most of us know that it is. Your tastes haven’t suddenly changed just because other people are in the room. Why do you feel differently?

Collective Sensibility

Well, assuming that you’re a person with a healthy amount of empathy, your tastes actually have changed in that moment - somewhat. It turns out that human beings have a lot of psychological, perhaps evolutionary, tendencies towards thinking as a group and as a community when we are in the presence of other people. We can be perhaps more like a hivemind than we realize.

When I think about pop music in relation to this group sensibility that seems to emerge when people are together, it makes perfect sense that pop music is so difficult to produce and that pop stars are paid so well. These stars and the people around them have found an ability to tap into that collective consciousness that emerges only when people get together, and appeals to the preferences of that consciousness.

Universal Taste in Product Design

There are many domains that are not as glamorous as pop music but require the same sensibility. If you are working in software, helping to design a product, designing interfaces and features in a way that appeals to the general public across a wide variety of individual perspectives and preferences is a very unique skill and one that’s very difficult to develop.

While most of us are not born with an innate level of talent in doing this, I believe there are some ways that we can tune our tastes to tap into that collective sensibility, that universal taste, when we need to.

Developing Universal Taste

The most important thing to do is probably not to create your product in a silo. The agile approach to developing software depends mostly on frequent demos with the customer. This reminds me of how the Beatles spent 10,000 hours as teenagers in England and Germany, playing shows constantly and having a continuous iterative feedback cycle with their audience.

The next best thing you can do is probably to inundate yourself with products that have already proven that they do appeal to that universal sensibility. I’ve found that listening to The Beatles before I give conference talks helps me better connect with the room - in ways I can’t explain.