Decision Making: The speed of taste

What is the speed of taste?

The speed of taste is your ability to recognize great digital experiences quickly. When you can generate multiple variations across text, image, video, and interactive prototypes, the competitive advantage goes to teams who can spot winners and move forward with confidence.

This skill combines pattern recognition, creative judgment, and decision-making speed. Teams with strong speed of taste can evaluate 5 website concepts, 10 videos, and 20 motion studies in a few hours and confidently pick the best directions. Teams without it spend days debating variations that were never going to work.

The new creative bottleneck

Creation used to be the hard part. A designer would spend days crafting a single website mockup, writing copy, and creating assets. Now that same designer can prompt different AI tools for layouts, copy, visuals, and motion graphics. The bottleneck moved from making options to choosing between them.

The numbers tell the story:

• Traditional workflow: 1 complete concept in 2 weeks

• AI-assisted workflow: 5 websites, 10 videos, 20 motion studies in a few days

• Evaluation time: Often longer than creation time

When you can generate a week's worth of concepts in hours, you need evaluation systems that work at the same speed. Most teams are still using the same critique process they used for one concept. That approach breaks when you have 35 variations across different media types.

"The speed of taste is pattern recognition applied to digital experience judgment."

Teams that adapted their evaluation process are moving at lightning speed. Teams that didn't are stuck in analysis paralysis, spending more time choosing than creating.

Practical frameworks for rapid curation

When you're looking at 35 digital experiences across different media types, you need systems that work efficiently. Here are the frameworks that actually work in real creative departments.

The three methods that cut through option overload:

• Binary elimination - quick yes/no decisions across all media types

• Media bucketing - separate text, image, video, and interaction concepts

• Experience scoring - rate on user flow, visual impact, and technical feasibility

Teams that use all three methods can go from a project's worth of concepts (35 total) to 3 finalists in under 4 hours. Teams that skip systematic evaluation often spend days debating variations that should have been eliminated in the first pass.

Tools that actually work

The right tools make the difference between smooth curation and chaotic overwhelm. Here's how we organize rapid evaluation across the full spectrum of digital experiences.

Our rapid curation toolkit:

The key is choosing tools that handle multiple media types seamlessly. Teams that use different tools for text, image, video, and prototypes lose speed switching between platforms.

"The tool doesn't make the curation faster. Your system for evaluating experiences does."

Training your eye for digital experiences

Speed of taste for digital experiences develops through deliberate practice across all media types. Creative directors who can evaluate complete experiences quickly have trained their pattern recognition through thousands of decisions.

Daily evaluation exercises build recognition speed across media. Spend 15 minutes each morning looking at websites, apps, videos, and motion graphics. Practice quick yes/no decisions on user experience, visual impact, and technical execution. Don't analyze why something works. Just train your gut reaction to respond faster.

Cross-media reference building creates the mental database that powers quick decisions. Collect examples of strong text, compelling visuals, engaging videos, and smooth interactions. When evaluating new concepts, you can quickly compare against your reference library and spot patterns across different media types.

The difference between "good execution" and "right experience" becomes crucial when working fast. A video might be beautifully crafted but wrong for the user journey. A prototype might be technically perfect but miss the emotional connection. Teams with strong speed of taste can make these distinctions efficiently.

The psychology of choice overload

When options multiply across text, image, video, and interaction, decision quality often decreases. Creative teams face this challenge daily when working with AI-generated experiences.

Decision fatigue hits teams that evaluate too many variations without breaks. After looking at 5 website concepts, 10 videos, and 20 motion studies, your judgment starts to blur. The solution is batching evaluation sessions by media type and taking breaks between rounds.

The good enough threshold becomes essential for maintaining momentum. Define what constitutes a strong experience worth developing across each media type, then stop generating when you hit that bar. Perfect experiences don't exist, and the pursuit of perfection kills project timelines.

Building confidence in rapid decisions requires practice and trust in your evaluation system. Teams that second-guess every choice move slowly. Teams that trust their process and move forward with conviction get better results.

"Strong speed of taste means you recognize great experiences quickly, regardless of medium."

Speed of taste in practice

Teams with strong speed of taste work differently across all digital media. They can evaluate AI-generated websites, videos, copy, and prototypes efficiently, make creative decisions with confidence, and consistently deliver experiences that feel right.

The project evaluation method structures your workflow efficiently. Generate your project's output (5 websites, 10 videos, 20 motion studies). Use rapid elimination to get to 15 viable directions. Apply detailed criteria to select 3 finalists for development.

Media-focused generation blocks split the creative process efficiently. Morning for text generation with Claude code and Manus. Midday for visual creation with Midjourney and Google Banana. Afternoon for video with Runway and Veo3. Evening for prototype assembly with Figma Make and Framer.

The goal is reaching the point where you can look at any digital experience and know quickly if it has potential, regardless of how it was created or what media it combines.

Conclusion

The speed of taste is your competitive advantage in the age of multiple creative possibilities. Teams that can evaluate complete experiences efficiently and confidently will outpace teams that get stuck in analysis paralysis.

The future belongs to creative professionals who can spot great experiences and move forward with confidence. Who can guide AI generation toward promising directions and recognize breakthrough concepts when they appear. At Studio Hyra, we believe this skill will define the next generation of creative teams.

That's the speed of taste in action.

Author
Tom Spel
Classical training, modern thinking
Design Director at Studio Hyra