These domains are termed based on a
Strongest alliance domains, historic influences, the job at hand but also
The professional background of people working in these jobs. In my case, I prefer to call it UX strategy based on my professional UX background. I stick to digital/product companies and make use of UCD processes to research, define and design. In a organizational setup, I also have close working ties with marketing intelligence, customer care, retailers, call centers mainly to feed customer centric learnings back into the product development funnel.
In my view this works fabulously, with a chain of people managing each function with an over arching learning loop being created across functions. If I may call it, a model like this establishes a CX culture which is more important than the role of CXO.
I would not advice a person with a core UX expertise to necessarily move towards a strategic function, but rather establish partnerships.

However, the article ignores a significant development within the UX community that addresses this issue, namely UX Strategy. UX Strategy combines user experience design with business strategy. It uses a broad range of business plans, customer data, market data, and competitive benchmarking to guide the design of customer experience touchpoints. The UX Strategy and Planning group on LinkedIn has over 2,000 members who are focused on the larger problems of business and organizational success through UX principles. Planning has begun for a UX Strategy Conference, that will address many of the issues you raised in this article, as well as building bridges between UX and other power cores within the company.

The growing UX Strategy field, which is seeing an increased number of recent job postings that directly specify this skill set, gives UX professionals a career growth path that allows them to increase their influence while at the same time remaining involved with design. After all, many UX professionals do not want to move into jobs that involve the placement of bathrooms in stores, call center scripts, return policies, and hygiene of employees. Their passion is design, but they want to see the scope of their work include sustainable impact on the organizations they serve. UX Strategy provides that opportunity.

(Disclosure: I am involved in the UX Strategy group and conference mentioned above)

Paul Bryan
Usography

Your article also brings to mind another thread I’ve been pulling on lately, which is about experiences of other people, like factory workers, or “things” such as the environment. How are these affected by what we are doing? How can we ensure that they are not negatively affected or better yet, positively affected by our work?

I’m toying with, “Lean, Green and Serene” design. And, I agree, “service design” seems a better description of what we are talking about, but I wonder if “experience design” is more comprehensive? I keep cringing with the concept of “user” it is too limited, and does associate the work to the digital graphical interface world. Under Experience Design (XD),we can affect not only physical and digital products and services but the people creating them and things impacted by their creation, distribution and use.

Thanks again for this well written piece.

I’ve found that one of the drawbacks of having a CXO team with a Marketing/Process Engineering background is that they rely heavily on surveys and market research to identify the VOC (voice of the customer).

As a UXer I find a great way to be heard is to educate the rest of the organization on the benefits of User Centered Design (e.g., personas, contextual inquiry, design research, etc…). Like most marketing teams, the tools of the UX community are fairly new and need some explanation. I have found a UX approach to be well received since our techniques focus on customer’s behavior instead of marketing tools which focus on customer’s opinions.