From Surface to Strategy: Why UX Belongs at the Leadership Table

The problem: Many companies view UX design as a final step—modernizing or making the product look good—leading to products that underperform and miss critical business objectives. A superficial approach to UX overlooks deeper strategic issues like user trust, business goals, and organizational structure, hindering true product success and market competitiveness.

The solution: Embrace a comprehensive understanding of UX design, from visual surface to underlying strategy, integrating design thinking at every level of product development and organizational leadership.

Key takeaways:

UX design involves five layers: surface, skeleton, structure, scope, and strategy.
Strategic design thinking can uncover root problems and build user trust.
A mature design organization integrates design into both product and organizational strategy.
Leaders should evaluate designers for both creative and strategic capabilities.

🎧 Listen to the Humans First episode to hear the whole conversation:

Beyond “Pretty”: Unlocking the Strategic Power of UX Design

In today’s competitive digital landscape, User Experience (UX) design is often lauded as a crucial component for product success. However, a widespread misconception persists: that UX design is simply about making something “look pretty” or ensuring a polished or “modern” user interface (UI). This superficial understanding frequently leads to products that underperform and fail to meet their full potential. The truth is, effective UX goes far deeper than the visual surface, influencing critical aspects of product functionality, user adoption, and even overarching business strategy.

The Five Essential Layers of User Experience

To truly harness the power of UX, it’s vital to understand its multi-layered nature, as inspired by Jesse James Garrett’s influential framework, The Elements of User Experience. Many organizations often stop at the most visible plane, missing the comprehensive approach that yields truly impactful design.

Here are the five critical layers of UX design:

Surface: This is what most people initially associate with UX design – the visual design, graphic elements, and the interactive components a user directly sees and touches. While crucial for first impressions, aesthetic appeal, and product desirability, focusing solely on this “makes something look pretty” aspect misses the deeper mechanisms at play. We think this is essential to a products success, only if it’s paired with the rest of the layers of UX design.
Skeleton: Beneath the surface lies the skeleton, which defines the layout and arrangement. This includes wireframes, detailed interaction design, and the granular visual design of individual elements. It dictates the precise placement and the sequential flow of user interactions, mapping out the product’s functional pathways in a tangible way.
Structure: This layer is where information architecture and content strategy come to life. It’s about the deliberate organization, categorization, and presentation of information. Think of it as meticulously crafting the “rooms and spaces of the tools that you’re using”, ensuring logical flow, intuitive navigation, and a user experience that feels inherently natural and predictable.
Scope: Here, the product’s true purpose begins to solidify. The scope delineates the features and functionality. Critically, it’s not just a comprehensive list of “what it does”; it involves strategic considerations like roadmap prioritization—determining “what needs to come first, what can come down the road”. This layer necessitates thoughtful decisions about market entry and iterative development.
Strategy: This is the deepest and often most overlooked layer. Strategy involves a profound understanding of high-level user goals and needs, how those user needs align with business goals and objectives, and how they connect with the underlying technology. It questions the very foundation of the product, thinks beyond the product, and is where the opportunity to truly innovate in the market lies.

What happens when layers of UX design are skipped?

One common oversight is to assume that strategy and scope are done without the voice of design, leaving design thinking to focus on surface-level problems rather than bringing an innovative voice to the leadership table.

Another common (and often costly) oversight involves attempting to jump directly from strategy to surface, completely bypassing the essential middle layers that define scope, structure, and skeleton. A strategic vision might be compelling, but if the intervening layers are inadequately addressed, teams can find themselves trying to build a concept without a clear understanding of the necessary iterative steps or what a viable first version truly entails. This shortcut can lead to significant backtracking, wasted resources, and profound organizational frustration.

Go deeper: How long does UX take?

The Evolution of Design Engagement: Moving Beyond the “Make it Pretty” Mandate

We’ve seen it many times: organizations often initiate their engagement for a design project with a seemingly straightforward request: “Can you refresh our UI?” or “Can we just tackle some quick UX wins?”

While this initial ask might seem superficial, it often represents an early stage in understanding design’s broader, transformative potential. As a design team demonstrates its capabilities and earns trust, that initial, limited engagement often evolves in this way:

Initial Product Tactical Request: The focus is on immediate, surface-level aesthetic improvements designed to achieve “quick wins” in the marketplace.
Product Strategy: Once the value of design beyond aesthetics is understood, clients often pivot to seeking strategic input about the product. This may include thinking about the whole suite of products and how they work together, or planning for the future to best the competition. This is where product design transcends mere appearance and becomes truly predictive and impactful.
Organizational Strategy: This represents a pivotal shift, as clients recognize the need to embed design thinking internally. They begin to ask, “Now that you’ve developed a strategy for our products, can you teach us to do it?” This involves helping internal design teams improve their capabilities and integrating human-centered design principles into core business processes.
Organizational Tactical Implementation: Beyond just strategy, the engagement can extend to actively helping organizations implement these strategic organizational changes. This might involve training design teams, or even assisting business development teams in proactively identifying opportunities for UX support.

This progression demonstrates that design is not a static function confined to a specific department. It’s a dynamic force that can—and should—ascend to the highest levels of organizational influence. It serves not just as an activity but as a powerful “strategic tool” that can facilitate understanding the deeper problem within the product space or within the ecosystem of the business.

Go deeper: Defining Design: Discovering the Underlying Human Problem

Why Strategic Design Thinking Needs a Seat at the Leadership Table

A critical challenge arises when organizations mistakenly believe they have already accomplished the strategy or scope before bringing design into the fold. This often stems from a lack of understanding regarding how design thinking can contribute significantly at the strategic level.

Challenging Assumptions for Deeper Insights

The power of human-centered design lies in its ability to create “space to think.” Designers, by nature, are inquisitive and can question beyond what we think the strategy or goals might be. This critical inquiry is not intended to be disruptive; rather, it is a direct path to uncovering hidden assumptions and exposing gaps in perceived strategies.

Visualizing Complexity Transforms Understanding

Designers bring a unique skillset, including the ability to visualize complex information in real-time. For example, using a collaborative whiteboarding tool during a high-level meeting can be an eye-opening kind of experience, enabling leaders to visualize the problem in a much different way than traditional bullet-point slides, fostering deeper engagement and more robust discussions.

Uncovering Root Problems Delivers True Value

Strategic design thinking moves beyond superficial symptoms to identify the true underlying issues. Here’s a real-life example we’ve experienced: a financial client asked for a simple mobile app that could make retirement account deposits. Initial research revealed a deeper problem: a distrust in how the retirement and investing system worked. The organization’s leaders were aware of this distrust but had not connected it to the solution.

Our approach challenged the initial ask to just create a deposit app and recommended building a comprehensive retirement planning tool that helped users gain control over the impact that their saving now could have on their future. The ultimate goal shifted from tactical ask of an app to make deposits easier to a strategic approach at winning “the trust war”.

Investing in the Right Talent and Mindset to Build a Mature Design Organization

Leaders seeking to elevate their product’s success must critically assess the maturity of their design function. This demands more than casual hiring; it requires thoughtful practices, clear communication, and a comprehensive understanding of what true strategic design entails.

Hiring for Strategic Design Capabilities

When hiring internally or engaging a design agency, leaders should seek a balance of skills in both creative and strategic outputs. This means evaluating candidates not just on their portfolio’s aesthetics, but on how they’re solving the business problem.

A team composed solely of “surface designers” will inevitably leave strategic gaps, failing to address the deeper problems that truly impact product performance.

Learn more: 4 Must-Have Qualities in a UX Hire

Recognizing the “Language” of Design Maturity

A simple—yet incredibly effective—litmus test for leaders to assess their organization’s design maturity is to keenly listen to the language used in daily discussions about design.

Less Mature Design Culture: Hearing phrases like “make it look pretty,” “lipstick on a pig,” “modernize the UI,” or “just dress it up” indicates a very juvenile vernacular for the power of design.” This suggests a significant gap in strategic design thinking that needs to be addressed.
More Mature Design Culture: Conversations will revolve around concepts like “engaging end users,” “winning market share by reducing complexity,” and “strategically thinking about this from a design perspective.” These organizations, by prioritizing strategic design thinking will ultimately win market share.

Furthermore, self-awareness within technical teams is a strong indicator of maturity. When engineers or product managers acknowledge the inherent, technically complex nature of a solution and discuss the need to mask the complexity to make it more simple for the user, it signals a deeper understanding of the user’s experience beyond just technical implementation.

Learn more: How can we improving our company’s design maturity?

Bridging the Internal Perception Gap

Even within design teams, a perception gap can exist. One experience we’ve had involved seasoned design leaders finding a quarterly design onsite to be highly productive and strategic, while newer designers felt they “didn’t talk about design at all,” because the discussions were centered on business implications and the ecosystem of products rather than visual design.

This underscores the importance of internal education and alignment on what “design” truly encompasses at its various strategic levels. It emphasizes that design thinking is not limited to those with a “designer” title; it’s a valuable approach for leaders across the organization.

The path to impactful product design is unequivocally clear: it’s not about superficial aesthetics. It’s about purposefully embracing design as a powerful, multi-layered strategic tool. By understanding the full spectrum of UX layers and fostering a culture that values thoughtful, deep design thinking, organizations can confidently move beyond simply “pretty” and create truly effective, trustworthy, and market-leading products that resonate profoundly with users and drive exceptional business success.

Listen to the full discussion on Humans First:

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