Here I wrote a brief summary of the 1st Conference on User Experience Strategy called UX STRAT 2013 (in Japanese).

http://www.underconcept.com/blog/archives/888

I wrote topics summary and some comments on this conference.

Below, I have translated these comments into English:

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After Nathan’s keynote, I got the impression that two different points of view are intermingled in this conference. The first one is how to integrate a UX design into a corporate (or business) strategy, i.e. UX Design for Corporate Strategy, and the second one is a strategic viewpoint of UX design, i.e. Strategy for UX Design.

The term #uxstrat seems to be used as strategy for UX and UX for business / corp strategy. Both are important but need to clarify them.

— Atsushi HASEGAWA (@ahaseg) September 10, 2013

I asked Paul, who is the founder of UX STRAT, about this point directly. He answered that UX STRAT was a conference exactly to discuss this point. He told me that he had a vision that UX design could be integrated into a corporate / business strategy, and he organized UX STRAT to actualize this vision. In fact, I felt that this subject was realized by lots of attendees, I heard similar conversations everywhere and saw them on Twitter with a ‘#uxstrat’ hashtag.

These days, UX design is not only an issue of product / service development, but it is also starting to have a meaning for business overall. So, organizations have to consider how to introduce UX design into their business. This conference revealed that there are some stages of integration. On each stage, there is a right process and a right role definition. An organization should choose the right combination depending on the maturity of the organization and UX team. There was a panel discussion on “who is the owner of UX strategy?” There were a wide variety of suggestions such as the project manager, project owner, or product manager. The variety of the role corresponds to the stages, so all of them are right, but we should recognize that our agenda is to establish “which stage our organization is at.

This is the issue that Paul wanted to address within UX STRAT; it was a great result that we could share this viewpoint.

In Japan, the term UX Design is only considered to be an advanced UI design, even now. Design Thinking or Service Design are rather popular. However, the integration is still at in early stages.

Regarding the Service Design, I wondered why no-one had mentioned things related to service design. Service Design is a concept to restructure a business with customer values, so in other words, UX Strategy could be defined as a strategy for an organization to renew an oriented Service Design.

I continue this discussion in the next UX STRAT and UX Strategy Japan community.