Most durable things I have learnt about design
Set expectations, meet expectations.
Just lining things up makes it better (and the converse, a product dies but a thousand design errors and it is like a phase change).
The consequences of how a design is experienced cannot be linearly mapped to individual design choices. User experience is holistic, design work is surgical.
Think about cognitive and motor load. Shorter is not always better and longer is not always worse.
Beauty wins, eventually.