I think too much time is spent thinking only "obvious" features are well designed. If it's not obvious it's poorly designed. It doesn't have to be this rigid dichotomy. I think Jason Fried put it best here: https://medium.com/@jasonfried/the-obvious-the-easy-and-the-... Some stuff should be obvious, but some can just be easy, and some - just possible. Putting things into those three buckets vs trying to cram everything into obvious is where we make well designed things.