have you looked at the User experience definition of

ISO standard:

ISO DIS 9241- 210:2008.

Ergonomics of human system interaction

- Part 210: Human - centred design for interactive systems

(formerly known as 13407).

International Standardization Organization

(ISO). Switzerland

I have found that people tend to assign a higher quality value to those interfaces that they enjoy more due to interface's attributes. For example, aesthetics, balance, among others.

Physiological signalscan be used to measure, in real time, what  the user is experiencing. For example, using EMG to record facial muscles can tell you whether the user is smiling/frowning. Measuring skin conductance can tell you when the user is excited/aroused. ECG can be also used for variety of purposes, and EEG (and other brain imaging technologies) allow a very wide range of possibilities.

Good thing about these is that not-only they can be recorded in real time, they can also be used to adapt the user experience in real-time. If user finds something frustrating, it can be changed on the fly.

Hello, I am not sure there is a universal answer to that question. To repeat the old mantra of interaction design, it all depends on the context of use, i.e. users, tasks, and

environment.

Pete mentioned "Gamification" which certainly is a current trend. Not just web businesses but also enterprise business and industry are discovering it. From my point of view it is questionable whether gamification is always the answer. For example, as soon as employees in a company feel that gamification is supposed to manipulate them into producing more output at the cost of personal and family life, then it is not going to work anymore. So, like any other approach, gamification has a context where it is useful. But unless you understand the context of use and the motivation of the users, you are unlikely to succeed. In a job-related context we often get the biggest smiles when we reduce the difficulty to complete the users' tasks. In consumer products aesthetics and playful elements can give you a great advantage.

I believe the only universal claims you can make is this:

1. Every design element needs a purpose. Give your application a clear purpose and use it to strictly prioritize features. Decide what is most important! Leave out the rest or at least put it into the second row.

2. Design for the specific context of use.

Some people may find that rather disappointing because there is no simple thumb rule that can be used. But if it were simple, we all would be as successful as Steve Jobs ;-) But if you want it more specific, you have to give us more details about the context that you had in mind.

In the end good UX is not a matter of a certain "technique" or "pattern" you use in your application. It is the process that leads you there. Do you work iteratively? Do you have a design team with mixed professions? Do you do testing?

Which brings up the question on how to measure if you reached your goal. I am afraid, there doesn't seem to be a real-time measure that provides enough reliability in single individiuals to be used in interaction design. Whether we look at psychophysiological measures, facereaders or other techniques, they are not (yet?) advanced enough to do the job. At this point you can use the standard repertoire of techniques like questionnaires, qualitative methods, etc. These methods may have their shortcomings, but they do the job quite

well, actually.

Like others have said, there is no hard and fast rule for innovative UX.

Not all products based on UX design will be always successful.  But, those that will entice enjoyable, fun and cool experiences on users might be very powerful and useful.  

Here is some useful resource about UX

http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/user_experience_and_experience_design.html

I agree that there is no silver bullet. I would suggest that there are generally two values to aim for:

(1) reduce cognitive distance between the human and the activity or environment in which they are engaged, and

(2) preserve flow.

Gamification, while sometimes well-intentioned, tends to increases cognitive distance. Likewise, gamification can break flow as one is being asked to think of one sort of activity as if it were something else. For example, one of the teams I'm working with at UCSC is developing games that can crowd-source formal code verification. We and our colleagues have all gotten player feedback that says, variously, drop the gamification (whether it is a narrative or a metaphor). For our audiences, framing the activity frankly as citizen science is a better and more honest choice.

Hope this helps.

Take for example this online-resume-with-a-twist:

http://www.rleonardi.com/interactive-resume/

From a design background, I believe that user experiences that inspire and excite you, based on aesthetics and fresh ideas, is something considered as "high quality user experience". As cliche as it sounds, you should think outside the box and see things from a different point of view (twist things) when designing with innovation. 

While there is no silver bullet, there are some ways to design a user interface to achieve a UX that is perceived as "natural", "intuitive", or "direct" by users or gets users "in the flow". While these concepts are fuzzy, hard to formalize and they defy a clear scientific definition, there are attempts to better understand when these perceptions of a high quality UX are most likely and how to design for them.

Maybe the first attempt were the works of Ben Shneiderman and Hutchins et al. on "direct manipulation" in the 1980s. They are still very inspiring to read and are useful, even though our technology has come a long way since then:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.296.5944&rep=rep1&type=pdf

http://www-ihm.lri.fr/~mbl/ENS/FONDIHM/2013/papers/Hutchins-HCI-85.pdf

In our recent work, we tackled the question of a "natural" UX of contemporary interactive technologies. For example, we looked at this for interactive visualizations (e.g. by using tangible objects on interactive tables to interactively explore data) or for interactive spaces, i.e., rooms with multiple screens and devices and novel ways of interaction (tangible interaction, digital pen and paper, multi-touch input, gestural input). The attached publications might be helpful.

While these consider UX as mostly defined by cognitive aspects, there are also models that incorporate emotional and even organizational aspects into modeling what a "good" UX is.

Marc Hassenzahl has done some great work on the "hedonic quality" of an interactive product that contributes to quality UX.

I also worked on a broader definition of "good" UX for practitioners back in the days that also includes emotional and organizational aspects. Maybe some of the references in that paper are useful.

Conference Paper A Simplified Model of User Experience for Practical Application

Article Fluid interaction for information visualization

Article The Interplay of Beauty, Goodness, and Usability in Interact...

Article Blended Interaction: Understanding natural human-computer in...

Cultural User Experience: in example, UX in museums after a visit.