Help! How did the Beatles use their fans to improve their music?

The very best artists and musicians possess an obsessional commitment to their art alongside a superhuman determination (or is it belligerence) to resist compromise. It’s not for nothing that artistic differences has wreaked so much havoc on promising rock groups.

20-year-old broke George Michael ignored the production contribution of Gerry Wexler on his song Careless Whisper (the man who coined the phrase rhythm and blues and had produced Ray Charles, the Allman Brothers, Chris Connor, Aretha Franklin, Led Zeppelin, Wilson Pickett, Dire Straits, Dusty Springfield and Bob Dylan by that stage) to record the song his way. Arrogance? The naivety of youth? Or just an artist determined to follow his artistic vision?

Rather than double down on the commercial success of the Revolver album, The Beatles went in an entirely different direction for their next release by producing a concept album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, incorporating psychedelia, orchestral arrangements, and experimental studio techniques.

In fact, the list of artists who resisted the commercial overtures of their record labels is long – Prince, Bruce Springsteen, Nirvana and Radiohead all had the talent and vision to take steps into the creative unknown against the advice of their producers and managers. Fortunately for them, they had just enough power and talent to insist that things were done their way.

What is striking about the Beatles in particular is that despite their artistic confidence, they kept their feet on the ground when it came to connecting their art to their audience.

Their producer George Martin would insist that their recordings were played through a small cheap speaker before being finalised, because he knew most of their fans would be listening with a transistor radio or a Dansette or Victrola record player. Even though the recordings sounded superb through the expensive high-quality speakers in the recording studio, he had the foresight to know that this wasn’t the environment in which the music had to thrive, so he invested time making sure it excelled where it needed to.

The Beatles may have pioneered the practice but across music, film and gaming, others saw its value and embraced it.

Moving music genres, the hip-hop industry uses the “car test” when finalising their mixes. Because so much hip-hop music is played in cars, producers often take tracks out of the studio and play them in a car to see how the bass, treble, and overall mix sound. This helps to make sure that the music sounds good on car speakers, which are often bass-heavy and less precise than studio monitors.

American filmmaker, visual artist, and musician David Lynch described by the Guardian in the late noughties as the most important filmmaker of the era, enjoys a global renown for the quality of the audio in his movies. He regularly reminds interviewers that “Films are 50 percent visual and 50 percent sound. Sometimes sound even overplays the visual.” As part of his creative process, he invests time ensuring that the audio mix in his movies translates well across different speakers, from high-end cinema sound systems to small home televisions. His obsession with sound has extended to creating versions of his films specifically mixed for TV to ensure that viewers at home experience the sound design as intended.

Pixar unsurprisingly do something similar with the visual elements of their movies. They rigorously test their animations on displays including smartphones, tablets, laptops, TVs and cinema to ensure colour grading and visual quality retains integrity across the various screen sizes and contexts of use.

Game developers too recognise that they need to optimise their games for the hardware that the majority of their audience uses. Xbox and PlayStation games are tested and assessed to ensure they look good on an average TV set-up and often include “performance modes” for older hardware or lower-end PCs, making sure that even players with less powerful systems can enjoy the game.

In user experience, we call this practice “getting outside the building," and it is good to be reminded that it was alive and well before user experience was a glint in its father’s eye. There is something incredibly powerful about de-sanitising design, investing time and effort to ensure that creative work is effective not just in the environment where it is produced, but also in the environment where it is consumed. It is valuable too to be reminded that such activity doesn’t compromise the output, rather it enhances it, making it more human and more powerful.

UX professionals are brought up on the mantra that “no good design decisions happen in the building," but before we understood that, those who went before recognised that neither do they happen in the recording studio, in the state-of-the-art cinema, or on the brand new piece of hardware.

Good design, like good art, improves by getting its hands dirty in the real world.