User Experience (UX) is the king of the kingdom. It's what can make a mediocre product exceptional, and a great product terrible. The mistake is thinking just about the product itself, and not about how people around it are going to interact with it. It's also a common misconception that User Interface (UI) is the same as UX. While they definitely work together, they're not the same. UI is the new Ferrari sitting at a racetrack; UX is the feeling you get when you drive the Ferrari around the track. UI also tends to start and end with the user, while UX encompasses everyone who comes into contact with the product in any meaningful way, from salesmen to service people, from the person who buys it to the person who uses it. And as you become better at UX, it starts expanding out beyond just the product at hand into the whole experience.

Take Apple for example. Whether you love their products or hate them, you can't argue with the craftsmanship that goes into them. That craftsmanship starts at the Apple store you buy it from, continues into the packaging it's contained within, the product that comes out of it, and the software running on the product. The packaging is probably one of the best examples. There is more thought and quality put into something meant to be discarded than into many finished products. That's a bold statement, because if the packaging contained anything less impressive, you would certainly not be thrilled with the time they wasted on the box. With Apple, it's part of the statement, "We're so good, we CAN waste time on the box."

Another common mistake is that technology somehow will help improve UX. It certainly can, but not without conscious effort. Let's use cell phones as an example. In the early 2000's the major manufacturers (Motorola, Blackberry, Nokia, etc.) had almost all released touchscreen phones that completely flopped. Their takeaway from their failure in the marketplace, and their experience in the industry led to a simple conclusion: "touchscreens don't work for phones; people want buttons." Then, in 2007 the iPhone was released and suddenly there was a sea-change: the touchscreen was amazing, and nobody wanted a phone with keys anymore. Fast forward to today, and all of the bestselling cellphones in the world are touchscreen. So was this because the technology made the difference? Obviously not, otherwise the entrenched phone manufacturers would have solved it with their versions. It took Apple, an outsider to the industry, who stepped back and didn't say "How do I take my existing flip-phone and incorporate a touchscreen?", and instead asked "What KIND of phone should only use a touchscreen?" They built something new, but the touchscreen didn't help them in any way.

Probably one of the most obvious examples of this is the current generation of wearables, most of which are really just glorified pedometers. Granted, newer devices are coming out daily with a whole host of sensors integrated, but the revolution started with just a new spin on the pedometer. Pedometers haven't really changed meaningfully in the hundreds of years they've been around. At their core they're still just a device that counts steps. And there have been digital ones available for more than 20 years, and for far less than the price of a FitBit or comparable device. So what happened? Why caused the sudden 'must have' reaction? There are always many variables, but one of the biggest changes that FitBit really introduced was tracking - the ability to see how much you did yesterday vs today vs last week. Sure, in the past you could have written this down in a journal, but they made it easy. And once they had this data, they could tell you all sorts of interesting things: how much better you were today, how many calories you burned, etc. None of these by themselves is a major hurdle, but they took a whole bunch of different steps, and combined them into one nice neat package. Once again, think of the Ferrari example, they changed their focus from the UTILITY of the device, into the EXPERIENCE with the device. Certainly branding was another major component in distancing themselves from older technology: "We're not pedometers! We're activity trackers!"

So next time that you use a piece of equipment that bothers you, think about why that annoyance exists. Is it something specific to you, or is it something that you would expect most people would encounter? And if it's something that is a broader problem, how else do you see it reflected in their other products? This isn't to say that any company or product is perfect, but that the smart companies learn and improve. Look beyond just the final product, and more how you interact with it.