A ‘Chief Experience Officer’ is an individual who is responsible for the overall user experience (UX) of an organization and/or it’s projects. This position has arrived mostly due to a rapidly changing design and technology landscape, a by-product of digitization which requires good design thinking at the leadership and implementation level. It is a holistic and unifying field that blends user, business, and project-appropriate experiences to deliver a solution at maximum potential and deepest market penetration. This position is relatively new and mostly non-existant in traditional models of business. Perhaps it will soon be a common title in all most all technology companies. A CXO’s work entails a broad range of areas such as marketing communications, marketing strategy, and user interface design of a company’s products and services.

The need for a new title at the C-Level arises because of the need of SME or ‘Subject Matter Expertise’ at leadership level. Unprecedented advances in telecom, e-commerce, augmented reality and the emerging wearables market require a rich, thought out and consistent user experience. A highly important aspect in a ever-changing market. ‘UX’ has finally climbed the ladder to the C-Level.

What are the responsibilities of a CXO?

1. Making UX strategy a primary objective of a company
2. Auditing Products and Services to simplify complex processes into simpler and easy to understand concepts.
3. Creative reviews/critique in Concept/Prototyping stage, so that end-products have maximum usability and aesthetic impact
4. Intellectual property positioning and protection to make sure ideas are not stolen un-intentionally or intentionally leading to legal nightmares at product launch or delivery.

In my current consulting and design experience, the status-quo process in user experience design goes through various independent departments or entities such as (Operations, I.T, Marketing, Software Development, and Pre-Sales.) Later on it is unified either through day-to-day meetings, and sometimes using functional teams composed of project managers and business analysts, that gather data and requirements before handing over tasks to the development/design team.

In simpler and more common words, the current customer experience is reflective of unique enterprise implementations of custom applications to suit project needs. In other words this can be stated as ‘Tailoring an existing product to suit the needs and requirements of a client or project’

To be a good CXO, the individual should understand the user needs, the business needs, technology, and basic fundamentals of visual design.

1. Understand the end-users, the segment and technology (Market Pulse and gathering functional requirements)
2. Figure out how the product should evolve over time to support the intended market. (Web>Mobile>Wearables>Augmented)
3. Have a plan of action to support and produce this output is also very important.
4. Visual Standards – Define the organization’s persona so that the experience can exude a certain ideology via Brand Manuals and Guidelines.

All in All, a CXO needs to stay on top of the product roadmap and experience strategy by being continuously updated/insync/in tune with the rapid changes in technology and evolving project requirements (End-users, Business, Brand, and Technology)

So who’s taking care of ‘User Experience’ in your Enterprise?