Usability battles: designers vs. developers [closed]

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We develop for web.

For some reason our design team hates [the look of] indented unordered and ordered lists. This is the default treatment for these lists, and I think it's for good reason. These types of lists are generally important, and indenting them draws attention to them, and makes them easier to read.

Every web app we build that has content management is sure to use lists, and I always get demands to remove the indenting on these lists. I try to ignore these requests as long as possible, but eventually design wins the battle.

The design team also hates when vertical navigation in a tree structure has sub-levels that are indented. They prefer to use colour, font size, font weight o开发者_StackOverflow社区r other treatments to indicate different levels in the tree. But again, indenting has to be removed.

These examples both seem to be absolutely terrible ideas in my opinion - but that's the problem - it's just my opinion. Without doing a full usability test (which most of our projects cannot afford), how can I determine what is the best usage? Since it's coming from design it seems that they carry more weight for usability because it's usally 'visual', not the developer implementing the designs.

I guess the questions here are:

1. Am I off base in thinking these are bad ideas? Can someone point me towards a study on this so I'm not relying on opinion? It's a little tough to search for this on the web. I tried Jakob Nielsen with no luck.
2. In the absense of a usability expert on your team, and in the absense of usability testing, how can a developer push back against design treatments that seem to represent poor usability?

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Personally I agree that indentation should be used in lists and menus. However, I don't think you're doing yourself any favors by arguing repeatedly. Someone has authority in your company and I wouldn't recommend arguing about the same thing once a decision is made. If the designers have authority over whether or not to indent, and they say not to indent, then suck it up and stop arguing.

and find something else to fight over that they haven't already dictated a standard for. :-)

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Keep in mind that developers are hired for their expertise in programming while designers are hired for their expertise in making things look really really good.

The two skills are fundamentally different. I'm sure there are decisions you make in the actual programming that the designers have absolutely no expertise in. People do better at what they specialize in.