Speedometer and speedtraps

OK we all know what a speedometer is (and a gas pedal and a mirror). Here comes the difference between user interface and user experience. A speedometer reading 130 mph is an interface. Seeing blue lights suddenly appear in your rearview is an experience. The needle on the gauge is accurate, but its bereft of sensory context and other important information. In this example, you keep pushing more on the pedal, going faster, and watching a needle pushing clockwise to ever greater heights. An important piece of feedback for the user, the speed limit, is missing. If you added location-awareness to your dial, you are traveling through a speed trap for instance, then UX would be satisfied as well. It's one thing to know the performance of the device from its interface, it's an even better thing to know what you can and should do with your device and how it is impacting you.

Cinnabon, McDonald's, Starbucks, and iPhones

You can see klutzy interfaces vs. snazzy ones in lots of places. Take a cup of coffee and a pastry for instance. The user can expect a certain amount of pleasure from these two items, they will feed her and provide some caffeine, regardless of the wrappers they present in. They could be served (presented) in a lunch box, a restaurant, a kitchen, a noisy bustling mall, or a drive-thru window (invented by a McDonald's located near a military base as a solution to regulations regarding soldiers in uniforms while in public, by the way) or any other number of equally adequate containers. The food is food and the drink is drink. The interface here is the cup and the platter (and a fork maybe).

The richness of the environment won't change the tastes or effects of these two foods, but there is a perceptual difference in a Starbucks coffee--vs one in a thermos--on the part of many users. There is a perceptual enhancement to an instantly available warm and gooey Cinnabon served retail to one that is prepared and served in one's kitchen with the implied time lag of having to cook and ice it first. 

Welcome to UI's replacement, User Experience. Not just for enhancing enjoyability, UX adds value when it suggests hidden features or capabilities that a device possesses but that are going underutilized by current users. Many failed services, products or devices that should have succeeded; shampoos with built-in conditioners, tiny city cars, foldable bicycles, etc., that solved actual user problems; failed based on experience-fails, not interface ones.

The current UX darling of the mobile phone market wars is the iPhone. With her UX sisters iPad and iPod, this branded product is a household word because it's so cool. Everyone who touches one wants one. iPhone, with the bitten-apple logo, is the emblem of good design, good interface, good experience, good everything. If you have one or borrowed one... the experience of wanting to do EVERYTHING it can do, the desire to run it through all its cool paces is a pinnacle of UX-based engineering. Breeding that level of desire in users should have a name. What do you call that phenomenon of a user interface that drives such targeted attention? Intuitive? Engaging? Seductive? Viral?