At Agency Fusion we design and develop digital products like Tweak CMS and Built for Teams, and we also let companies hire us who want to leverage our skills and experience to create and launch their own products. To create the best possible product, we focus heavily on designing the ideal user experience. The graphics we create and the overall "look and feel" are an essential part of creating a great user experience, but our definition of the complete user experience involves more than just the pixels the user sees on the screen.
Maybe an example will help illustrate what I mean and get you thinking about how you can improve your users' experience.
I'm a list maker, so I consider a good to-do app essential. I've tried a lot of to-do apps over the years and one of the best apps I've found so far is Wunderlist. I love that they have native apps for both Mac and iPhone, as well as a browser-based web app. Their cross-platform syncing is absolutely fantastic; events are synced in near real-time. There are a lot of other things I like about Wunderlist, but earlier this year I decided to switched to Any.do, in large part because I liked Any.do's user interface better. Any.do's UI was aesthetically more attractive to me, and there were a few features that saved me time and better matched the to-do paradigms under which I operate.
After a few months of using Any.do, I've switched back to Wunderlist in spite of preferring Any.do's user interface. Why? Because the rest of the user experience was so sub-par. An attractive and intuitive user interface got me to switch, but it wasn't enough to make me endure Any.do's sub-par customer support, buggy software, and seeming indifference to quality.
User interface design (both in terms of aesthetic appeal and ease of use) is a critical component of a great user experience, but make sure you spend equal time thinking more broadly about your product's total user experience. Great design alone won't make your product loved and shared.