One of the many reasons I like uncluttered and ornament-free interfaces is precisely because they are boring - these are tools at the end of the day and tools should strive to disappear; they are, after all trying to be extensions of myself, not fully realised personalities themselves.
If I want an experience, I'd rather go bungy jumping or parachute diving or whatever. When I want to get on with some work, I want to just that; not participate in a shallow, "user experience", desperate to justify its existence to itself.
"The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it."
[...]
"Such a disappearance is a fundamental consequence not of technology, but of human psychology. Whenever people learn something sufficiently well, they cease to be aware of it. When you look at a street sign, for example, you absorb its information without consciously performing the act of reading.. Computer scientist, economist, and Nobelist Herb Simon calls this phenomenon "compiling"; philosopher Michael Polanyi calls it the "tacit dimension"; psychologist TK Gibson calls it "visual invariants"; philosophers Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger call it "the horizon" and the "ready-to-hand", John Seely Brown at PARC calls it the "periphery". All say, in essence, that only when things disappear in this way are we freed to use them without thinking and so to focus beyond them on new goals."
"A good tool is an invisible tool. By invisible, I mean that the tool does not intrude on your consciousness; you focus on the task, not the tool. Eyeglasses are a good tool -- you look at the world, not the eyeglasses. The blind man tapping the cane feels the street, not the cane. Of course, tools are not invisible in themselves, but as part of a context of use. With enough practice we can make many apparently difficult things disappear: my fingers know vi editing commands that my conscious mind has long forgotten. But good tools enhance invisibility."
If I want an experience, I'd rather go bungy jumping or parachute diving or whatever. When I want to get on with some work, I want to just that; not participate in a shallow, "user experience", desperate to justify its existence to itself.