Peter Merholz (@peterme) is one of the most important persons in the UX world. Founder of Adaptive Path, he helped to define the UX consultancy practice by doing.

The following video was really important for me, because it gives the perfect idea about what is to be an UX Strategist, and from where we should view our practice.

Please watch the whole video before continuing:

If you want an abstract, here is what Peter published in his blog before the UX Week 2012 --where he delivered this lecture.

http://www.peterme.com/2012/05/04/user-experience-...

User experience is strategy, not design

User experience, when addressed appropriately, is an holistic endeavor. The emerging conversation of “cross-channel user experience" is redundant, because if you're weren't thinking cross-channel (and cross-platform, cross-device, etc. etc.), you were doing “user experience" wrong.

As the holism of user experience becomes more broadly realized, something else becomes clear. Earlier this week, designer Jonathan Korman tweeted, in response to a conversation taking place at the Re:Design UX conference, “STILL having trouble defining the UX design profession." I would argue that that is because there is no such thing as a UX design profession. User experience is a strategic framework, a mindset for approaching product and service challenges. In that regard, it is akin to Six Sigma or Total Quality Management.

It's only once we recognize UX as “an integrative philosophy of management for continuously improving the quality of products and processes" (to borrow Wikipedia's definition of Total Quality Management) that we appreciate it's truly massive scale, and how limiting it is for UX to be solely associated with specific (and usually screen-based) design practices. It's no wonder why at this year's IA Summit, which was explicitly about “cross-channel user experience", the primary emergent theme was how organizations need to break free of their industrial age, bureaucratic, and hierarchical ways, and embrace cross-functional means that align every employee's work around the customer experience.

The practice of user experience is most successful when focused on strategy, vision, and planning, not design and execution. In other words, UX adds value by bringing design practices to strategic endeavors. This means generative and exploratory user research, ideation and concept generation, scenario writing and roadmap planning. The impact of those strategic endeavors will not be limited to product and service design, but should be felt across business development, corporate development, marketing, engineering, sales, and customer service.

With respect to design execution, user experience should serve to coordinate and orchestrate a range of design efforts, not just that which has historically been called “UX design" (wireframes, architecture diagrams, prototypes, screen design). This includes industrial design, retail and space design, marketing and collateral design, and more. I think a huge challenge for “UX designers" has been to square the design legacy of making with the new reality of planning and coordination, because many don't feel legitimate if they are not building something tangible. It's great to build something tangible, but that is no longer “user experience" — it's just one of many activities that, in sum, fulfill on a user experience strategy.