Search “UX pyramid” and you will get dozens of them. They are stacked a little differently and labeled a little differently, but they mostly agree on the bottom. An interface has to be functional, usable, reliable—if it does not work, the experience is over before it begins. They mostly agree on the middle, too: once it works, it should be desirable, pleasurable, a pleasure to look at and to use. The base is table stakes. The middle is craft. It is the top of the pyramid where the agreement falls apart.
In a 2021 essay for UX Magazine that still circulates, the designer Dennis Hambeukers asked the question head-on: What is at the top of the UX pyramid? He borrowed the shape from Maslow, whose hierarchy of needs terminates in self-actualization—the drive to become the most you can be—and asked the parallel question about the discipline: what is the most UX design can become?
His answer is worth taking seriously, because it is a good one. Below the summit he places UX aligned to strategy: designing an application so it advances the organization’s actual goals, not just its own screens. Above that, UX shaping strategy: designers who live in the digital medium helping to write the strategy rather than merely executing it. And at the very top, game-changing UX—work that uncovers a need people didn’t know they had and, in solving it, changes the rules of the market. Netflix, not a better video store. It is a generous, ambitious vision of the craft, and Hambeukers is right that the move from good to great is where design leadership lives.
And yet the essay opens with an admission that turns out to be the most interesting thing in it: everyone agrees on the bottom, and nobody agrees on the top. A decade of practitioners have drawn this shape and then quietly disagreed about its peak—significance, meaning, delight, strategy, transformation. It is tempting to treat that as a gap in the theory, a question still waiting for the right answer. It is worth considering that it is not a gap at all. It is a property of the shape.
That is close to the argument Matthew Barzun brings to Season 7 of Invisible Machines, in an episode titled—fittingly—The Pyramid Was Always Wrong. Barzun, a former U.S. ambassador and the author of The Power of Giving Away Power, points out how reflexively we reach for the triangle whenever we want to organize anything: who is on top, who is below, who reports to whom. Even our attempts to escape it stay inside it. “Bottom-up,” he likes to note, is still a pyramid—you have just flipped it over and kept the ranking.
His counter-image is the constellation: stand out as yourself, connect to other points of light, and build something none of you could make alone. Barzun revives Mary Parker Follett, the management thinker Peter Drucker called his guru, who a century ago drew the distinction between compromise—where each side gives something up and nobody is happy—and integration, where the disagreement itself produces a third option neither party walked in with. A constellation is not a flat pyramid. It is a different geometry, one that does not need a top at all.
Hold the UX pyramid up to that light and the decade-long argument about its peak reads differently. The layers Hambeukers describes are real—usability, aesthetics, strategy, and the power to change the game are all things UX can do. What the pyramid gets wrong is the claim that they are stacked, that strategy sits above usability the way self-actualization sits above breakfast. A game-changing product with broken usability is not higher up the pyramid. It is just broken. The layers are not a ladder of worth. They are a set of capabilities that have to light up together, and which one matters most depends on the situation, not on its altitude.
None of this makes the pyramid useless. Hierarchies earn their keep. They are legible: a newcomer can look at one and understand, at a glance, what to learn first and what to reach for later. They sequence a curriculum—you really do need the interface to work before polish is worth anything. They give a scattered profession a shared vocabulary. The pyramid is a good teaching tool, and Hambeukers uses it as one: a ladder of ambition, a way of telling designers that there is more above the screen than the screen.
The trouble is that the same shape that makes a hierarchy teachable also makes it quietly misleading. A ladder points one way, so it implies the top is better and the bottom is beneath you—and that is how you end up with the designer who “does strategy” looking down on the one who “does buttons,” as if the buttons were not where the experience actually happens. It hides the lateral relationships, the way each layer depends on the others rather than resting on them. And a peak implies a finish line, a most-you-can-be, when in practice the work never resolves into a single summit you plant a flag on and leave.
Barzun’s answer to the org chart turns out to be the answer the UX pyramid needs too. The question “what belongs at the top?” smuggles in an assumption—that there is a top, that the discipline resolves upward into a single apex—and the assumption is the thing worth dropping. Keep the pyramid as a way to teach the order of operations. Stop treating it as a map of worth. What Hambeukers was really chasing at the summit—UX that changes the game—is not a higher rung. It is what happens when usability, craft, strategy, and organizational nerve stop competing for the top spot and start integrating: a constellation, not a climb.
This piece is a response to Dennis Hambeukers’ “What is at the top of the UX pyramid?,” published in UX Magazine in 2021, and to Matthew Barzun’s conversation on Invisible Machines. Read the companion essay on Barzun’s episode, or open the full Ideation hub.