Her father does not like it

A young woman in Jeddah sells phone accessories online to girls of about fifteen. She has just redone her shop page: loud colours, glitter, cheerful captions written the way her customers actually message each other.

She shows it to her father. He scrolls in silence and then says he does not like it.

He is entitled to that. He has his own taste, and it is probably a good one. But it does not answer the question she was asking. She did not ask whether a man in his fifties would buy a sparkly phone strap. She asked whether the page was good, and good here means something specific: will a fifteen-year-old in Riyadh or Dammam land on it, feel that it was made for her, and send it to her friends?

"I do not like it" and "nobody will like it" sound alike and mean entirely different things. The first is a report on the speaker. The second is a judgement about an audience, and it is only worth something if the speaker understands that audience.

People who make things for a living learn to keep the two apart. Nobody designing a playground is expected to want a turn on the slide. What they need is the ability to sit, for a while, inside somebody else's head, and ask what that person would notice, value and pass on.

Her father's taste is not the test. Neither is hers, if it comes to that. The test is the girl the page was made for.