Regarding your first sentence, usability is a feature - maybe the most important one. If you don't already have a knack for design, it's probably going to be h

Regarding your first sentence, usability is a feature - maybe the most important one. If you don't already have a knack for design, it's probably going to be hard to force it, but the Quora answer linked by another commenter seems pretty reasonable to me. The only trick I think you can use is to go minimal - the fewer "moving parts" 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.