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Chris Heathcote has it in mind that there is "no such thing as user experience," by which, I take it, he means that there’s no single thing that we can call "user experience." User experience is made up of a lot of things, and all these things need to be designed, and Chris’ problem seems to be that a lot of people who say they "design user experience" actually just do something like create user interfaces or write the script that the employees at the Apple store run on, and that this is demeaning to the actual breadth of the concept of "experience."

Chris Heathcote makes his point at his Flickr Photostream

Just as the words consumer and user are condescending to people, the word experience is condescending to the activity of people, or life. And it’s condescending to the people who work hard to create the products and services. Everyone seems to be an experience manager these days…Don’t try and fix everything (or be the one person who has to fix everything): find a company that believes in user experience, and find your niche and craft that lets you optimize your particular interaction for your customers. Play your part. Do your job.

I certainly agree with Chris that user experience is a catch-all for a bunch of different jobs, and is as such, that “Experience Designer” is a job title that belies either a timid bureaucrat, a flagrant social-climber, or a web designer a lot more often than someone with concrete design responsibilities in any kind of broad sense. But look: In the last year, I’ve also received business cards for “Experience Manager”, “Creative Executive”, “Futurist”, and the list goes on. In lieu of concrete responsibilities, people give themselves stupid, self-important job titles. Point taken.

Michiel T responds to Heathcote in the comments

But that hardly means that user experience is nothing. In fact, reading Chris’ post, it’s everything. So, rather than letting the inevitable pretensions of marginally-valuable creatives ruin a perfectly good framework, we need to first accept that any useful construct is going to be exploited, and second to continue to use it where it’s most valuable: as a lens through which we can evaluate the work of those disparate managers, designers, and service providers that make up the concrete elements of a product out in the world.

For my part, I think there can be real value in a "user experience coordinator," someone who can provide vertical coherence and quality assurance in customer experience. But, with Chris, let’s do call a spade a spade.