Should product owners force their design ideas into the final UI? [closed]

Question

I dont know if its a valuable argument or not, but its something that I think about it sometimes.

As a UI designer I always face a situaution when other people give their opinions about the UI, I know its their product and they have a right to tell us what they want, but if we look at it as product and compare it to other products like TV, cars and ... we never have an option to choose the interface of that product when we go shopping.

But in our product (UI) its different, everybody wants to put their ideas inside this product. I am not against researching and getting the people ideas and use them in our design process (UX) but do they have a right to tell us how we design the UI of the final product ?

Thanks

Answer 1

Whether they have a right to do so is purely a political/corporate org/process question.

Whether they should or not is entirely dependent on their abilities/expertise.

In either case, the challenge is how do you handle it as the UX person? Some suggestions:

• always have business partner input formatted in the form of a user story if possible. The idea is to get them to frame the request in terms of solving a particular problem. "Put the button here" isn't all that useful. "Put the button here because we've noticed it to be the primary task our users are looking for" is a lot better.

• ask for data when you can. "Make it purple" is a lousy request. "Make it purple because in our market research, we found our key demographic responds best to it" is a lot easier to design around.

• ask them what, if given the chance to test, would they feel is a succesful test scenario. This gets them thinking about bullet point one.

Ideally the PO asks you to solve specific problems rather than asks you to implement specific solutions. As much as you can, get business talking about problems--not solutions.

Answer 2

Well if you look at Product Owner's (PO's) role from the SCRUM perspective, it's the PO job to write stories that indicate what users wants to do and why, then prioritize the list of stories and provide additional requirements as needed. In terms of how the user's goal is accomplished, which includes the UI & technology, that's really not the PO's job.

Might be a good idea to also ask this over at pm.stackexchange to hear their thoughts on how you deal with it.