'Taste' is the most annoying word in design. It sounds either precious or dismissive, and it usually means 'I can't explain this to you but I'm right'. I've come to believe that's not wrong — only incomplete.
Taste is a distilled pattern-match across thousands of examples. If you've genuinely consumed that much, and you can't immediately explain the decision, that's a signal that you're operating from something real — not capricious.
The three questions I ask in a review
- What is the one sentence this screen needs to say?
- What would a smart person with no context miss?
- If we ship this today and measure it in six weeks — what would tell us we were wrong?
These questions move a review from 'do you like it?' to 'is it legible, is it honest, is it measurable?'. That's a conversation I can have with any stakeholder on any day. Taste survives.