[joveian]

My sense (and I think this matches what you are saying) is that the best design is to make habits smoother and doing that often involves difficult engineering. We like to think about reasons and meaning and purpose and such but humans are primarily a collection of habits with rare changes in intent and a lot of correcting for stuff that doesn't go smoothly. The best design often becomes almost invisible because it just works, but it takes a lot of design effort and engineering for that to be possible. If you write down the differences between a great design and an ok design they can often sound entirely trivial but aren't if you think from the perspective of habits.

I recently found this really excellently designed grain bin from Masuda Kiribako:

https://kirihaco.shop-pro.jp/?pid=181616902

It looks nice but is fairly simple; if you haven't spent a bunch of time looking at available alternatives it might not look like anything special. Keeping grain away from insects and humidity and oxygen (and sometimes rodents, though I'm not sure how well this one would do in that case) while still being able to access it easily is not trivial. Plastic buckets work well and are cheap but don't look as nice and most lids are annoying (I suspect the lid on this one might possibly be a bit annoying as well but likely not as bad). Glass jars are nice to use but fragile and best for smaller amounts. Wood is particularly challenging due to the dimensional instability and they use a particular type of wood with something like eight years of preparation to make durable boxes. (I suspect the magnet on the scoop is pure marketing though, you can't even use it when refilling if you hook the lid on the edge which is the one time it would be really handy).

I think low latency is one of the things that makes software and websites feel really nice to use and is often overlooked.