You, Sir, Experience

People always wax poetically about great user interface (UI), or look-and-feel.  User experience (UX) is a science, though, and I always appreciate the science behind everything.  Developing great UX is much more than just "look and feel", though, that sounds somewhat randy when I type it again and again.

It's no wonder I have no friends...

To the UX nerd, the depths of the science likely know no bound.  While Apple gets kudos for the simplicity of its design choices on the unibody MacBook Air or the iPhone 4, this excellent article today pokes at some of Apple's not so nice design choices and teaches us about skeuomorphic vs. metaphoric design choices.

In the case of application design, I believe that sometimes the most important decisions to affect the user experience are the features that are not included.  For example, Home Depot makes an extremely rich mobile application for the iPhone.  I'm not sure there is much you can not do on the app, but I wonder if there is much that you really won't do on a mobile app.  Removing that excess allows a focus on the features that have impact on their consumer's needs or their company's goals, all while freeing up valuable UI space for better creative treatments of what is most important.

In the world of mobile and mobile apps, beauty is indeed more than skin deep.