Regarding your first sentence, usability is a feature - maybe the most important one.<p>If you don&#x27;t already have a knack for design, it&#x27;s probably going to be hard to force it, but the Quora answer linked by another commenter seems pretty reasonable to me.<p>The only trick I think you can use is to go minimal - the fewer &quot;moving parts&quot; the fewer things there are to screw up.  Almost every bad engineer design I see is due to too much stuff going on rather than too little.