IA is the core of intelligibility. You need to have it for your product to have conceptual integrity; it is the metaphorical skeleton that holds up your product. If your team disagrees on this, maybe they should just throw some AI at it. That tends to work really well when your audience is gullible, thoughtless, and craven. A little like this whole AI answer feature — I’m gullible if I think this benefits anyone but LinkedIn’s thoughtless planners or craven investors.

At Stormdesigns we strive to focus on the users standards, norms and preferences. Ultimately that is what needs to guide the experience. Consider the balance of innovation with familiarity to create something “fresh yet familiar” so it feels novel and intriguing yet isn’t confusing or off-putting. Also note the benefits with each suggested approach and work to integrate the perspectives of any valid suggestions from your team. ??

If the UX team is competent and doing UX correctly, their personal preferences shouldn’t be an issue. The job of UX is to create functionality that fits user needs, not developer opinions. Test, demo, research, ask, then design the way the data and feedback directs you to. Don’t do UX based on the personal preferences of a UXer.

Arrange an activity to define/iterate clear design principles and user needs/challenges the organization wants to prioritize in the product. After that, allow the team to co-ideate and co-create. Parallel design and get user feedback. It will clarify most of the indecisiveness.

Make a case using data and analytics. People often have differences of opinion in design. You have to prove your design choices via logic, facts and actual studies. In one of my recent gigs, there was a difference of opinion about displaying search results using pagination versus infinite scroll. Based upon user studies, competitive analysis, and also the age and experience of the user base, I made the case for why pagination was the better option for the project and was supported by management based upon my presentation of data and facts.