UX is just a weaselly sales term, "Our product is not some mere (sneers) interface, no, over here it is a whole experience, you want an experience don't you?"
It's just the euphemism treadmill. Just like people perennially come up with new technical terms for the not-so-smart that are meant to be just technically and inoffensive, and over time they always become offensive, so someone has to come up with new technical terms.
> 'Idiot' was formerly a technical term in legal and psychiatric contexts for some kinds of profound intellectual disability where the mental age is two years or less, and the person cannot guard themself against common physical dangers. The term was gradually replaced by 'profound mental retardation', which has since been replaced by other terms.[1] Along with terms like moron, imbecile, retard and cretin, its use to describe people with mental disabilities is considered archaic and offensive.[2]
I once upon a time coin the term scientific physics. UX is not progress, it is the astrology of UI design. The UI exists between the silicon and the wetware computer as a means to interface the two. UX aims to modify the human and invade their state of mind. Doom scrolling is an example of great UX. Interact vs subdue. I want to experience the meaning of the email not the email application.
I don't think it's weaselly: it's not the first term that has lost its original meaning (like "hacker" or, ahem, "cloud") and required introducing specifiers to go back to the original meaning.
For fun, I did a search for "user interface" before:1996-06-01 .
I found a paper that was definitely taking the perspective that the "user interface" encompasses all the ways in which the user can accomplish something via the software. It rated the effectiveness of a user interface in terms of the time taken to complete various specific tasks. (While remarking that other metrics matter to the concept too, and also measuring user satisfaction and error rates.)
But that paper also suggested how the term might have specialized - four pieces of software were studied, and they are presented in a table that gives their "interface technology", in two cases a "character-based interface" and in the other two a "graphical user interface".
Enough usage like that and you can see how "interface" might come to mean "what the user interacts with" as opposed to "how tasks are performed".
( https://www.nngroup.com/articles/iterative-design/ . It really is dated 1993, which I made a point of checking because Google assigns the "date" of a search result based on textual analysis, and it is frequently very badly wrong. I can't really slam the approach, which I assume was necessary to get the right answer here, but the implementation isn't working.)
It's just the euphemism treadmill. Just like people perennially come up with new technical terms for the not-so-smart that are meant to be just technically and inoffensive, and over time they always become offensive, so someone has to come up with new technical terms.
See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot
> 'Idiot' was formerly a technical term in legal and psychiatric contexts for some kinds of profound intellectual disability where the mental age is two years or less, and the person cannot guard themself against common physical dangers. The term was gradually replaced by 'profound mental retardation', which has since been replaced by other terms.[1] Along with terms like moron, imbecile, retard and cretin, its use to describe people with mental disabilities is considered archaic and offensive.[2]