Probably one of the best stated defenses I’ve read for UX comes courtesy of this post in Smashing Magazine.  In talking about the brand loyalty of Apple users…

How do you make your customers trust you this much? The answer is to give the user an “Experience.” It is not enough simply to make a website usable. The experience you create for the customer has to make them not realize that they are “using” it. It’s a tough concept to grasp, and the recipe changes from website to website, but the right combination of usability, creative design, writing, psychology and metrics and a strong brand will create an experience through which your customers learn to trust you.

How true. This week I’ve been tossed back and forth between clients and bosses struggling with all the wants and demands and needs and the bottom line came down to making sure everyone realized that it has nothing to do with personal preference and like and dislikes, it’s about experience, and more than that it has to be tangible, palpable and reach the emotion of a human in a way that makes it memorable, or at the very least engaging.