UX taste and design judgment

Principle

AI-generated UI converges on the median of the training set — competent, familiar, forgettable. Taste is the ability to notice that convergence and choose otherwise when it matters.

Taste is not decoration. It is prioritization made visible: what gets emphasis, what gets silence, what feels trustworthy, what signals “this is for you.” In an AI-native workflow, taste is a product skill, not a handoff to a separate designer — though specialists still sharpen it.

The decision

  Clarity (can they complete the task?)
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Character (does it feel intentional for this audience?)
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Craft (typography, motion, density — last 10%)

What taste is not

• Not picking trendy gradients because Dribbble did.
• Not blocking ship until pixels are perfect.
• Not outsourcing judgment to “make it beautiful” prompts with no reference.

Taste is consistent choices aligned with who you serve and what you promise.

Developing taste with AI in the loop

1. Collect references — three products your audience already trusts. Screenshot the flows, not just landing pages.
2. Name the axis — warm vs clinical, dense vs airy, playful vs solemn. One sentence.
3. Generate variants — ask for three directions on the same wireframe, not three random pages.
4. Compare aloud — why does A feel cheaper than B? Write it down; that sentence becomes your design brief.
5. Lock tokens early — type scale, spacing, two colors, one accent. AI drifts less when constraints are explicit.
6. Test with strangers — hesitation at a button is taste failure, not preference.

Workflow

1. Clarity pass — can a new user finish the core workflow without help? Fix copy and hierarchy before color.
2. Reference pass — mood board + axis sentence in the repo (docs/design-intent.md or README).
3. Variant pass — AI or human produces options; you pick one and kill the rest.
4. Constraint pass — document tokens; reject PRs that invent a third blue.
5. Polish pass — only after validation and vibe exit criteria (Chapters 04, 07).

Tooling

Figma for reference and hand-tuned screens. v0 / Lovable for variants. Real content — not lorem ipsum — when judging layout. Your own product’s words beat placeholder text every time.

Common mistakes

• Letting every screen look like a different product because each prompt was fresh.
• Confusing animation with quality — motion without purpose annoys.
• Copying a reference’s palette but not its information hierarchy.
• Hiring design too late to fix structural confusion.

Artifacts

• templates/ux-review.md — clarity, character, craft checklist before ship.
• Design intent one-pager: audience · axis · references · tokens · anti-patterns.

Further reading

• Chapter 04 — Validation before code
• Chapter 06 — Vibe prototyping
• Chapter 07 — When to leave the prototype