At the end of August 2025 I started working on one of the most stupid personal projects I’ve ever embarked on: building a digital “life management” dashboard with Notion. I customized it with widgets I found on a website that offers a limited amount of free widgets, as if, there’s a reason to pay for something like that. I took my sweet time creating this dashboard, with the centerpiece being a database of 200+ links I could consider “useful” in my product design career, then wrote a meaningless article on Medium titled “The only library of free UX resources you’ll ever need.”
I had no clue what half of those links contained. I used Adam Dhanaway’s email marketing list to gain access to his list of a few hundreds of links, and extracted what looked good, and combined it with what I knew, which was also substantial because I’ve been hoarding “resources” for a while.
Before an interview with a company whose digital product will go bust in about a couple of years, I decided to procrastinate and opened the dashboard, then read some of the content in those 200+ links I’ve gathered. I sent my email to a few people and gained access to what they considered “free” content and I was… unimpressed, to say the least.
Take for example, Design System University. Looks good on the surface, the individuals who maintain it have good LinkedIn credentials, and there’s no reason to consider it a scam. The free course is a fine introductory sequence of videos I watched at 1.5x speed. The result was a few nuggets of insight, a couple of useful screenshots I saved in Eagle, and a few promotional emails I was punished with for thinking this world was so simple I could gain free access to mediocre content without paying, in some fashion, for it.
Again, I wouldn’t call this a scam, but it’s definitely a “noob” trap. The information isn’t good enough to take into the outside world, but I’ll wrestle with spam emails until I break down and pixel-hunt the “Manage your subscription” link. I think the absolute worst example of this is from growth.design, a website whose quality has been going downhill for a while now, and its course (which I’ve completed), which isa collection of stuff you could access by reading the few books they used to create the course.
On one hand, you could say it’s my fault for keeping this nothingburger of a site in my email list. On the other, growth.design used to be good, and most of their content is free anyway, so what’s the complaint guv’nor?
I mean, YouTube how-to’s are technically free, but unless you pay for a Premium subscription and use a browser that allows extensions for skipping “sponsor breaks”, digital advertising will waste your time, which is what you pay with for the privilege of accessing amateur content on what could be considered nowadays an “AI-driven platform”. Most of the links I’ve had in my database were technically free, or had a free tier, but I often had to pay with an email subscription, which leads to meaningless notifications from people I knew nothing about.
And for my time and effort in hunting down these “resources” I often had to sign up to a “video content” platform that collects my data. I don’t doubt the designers and educators creating the content have good intentions (and a keen business sense), but they are either unaware or intentionally overlook that they waste their customers' time.
I think the attention economy has werewolfed into the “time economy”, where digital businesses are competing for a few seconds of time, which is enough for a gullible person (like me) to click “Subscribe”, or “Buy”. Product design facilitates this by removing friction from payment forms, but businesses don’t make clear the hidden costs that come as interruptions.
Let’s dispense with the pretense. Late-stage LinkedIn, and the majority of courses promoted by “experts” in the field, isn’t educational; it’s content. “Content” refers to information easily accessible by anyone with a browser and a search bar, packaged in a form that’s designed to attract attention, and marketed as if it’s going to solve a specific problem. I have a new rule for any links I’ll store in a “resource” database: if I could feasibly replicate it using a few searches, it goes away. Using this simple method, I downsized my 200+ library to… 40. And before you ask, the library didn’t contain just links to books, but also inspiration boards and many “gallery” websites that copy from one another and re-package the content for views and sponsorships.
There’s a visible line between “education” and “content.” Some things steer so far in the direction of “education” that they lack entertainment value. Wikipedia is a great example of a purely educational product that’s a slog to read through, but the downside of it is that YouTubers, people who write clickbait on Medium, and content marketers in general, plagiarize it. Which rises and interesting point: are paywalls a good solution to communicating what’s “education” and what’s “content”? I think that’s the wrong question. The correct one is: at what point does paywalled content become a grift?
A grift is something that only benefits the grifter, and harms everyone else. Harm is also wasted time, and mixed feelings arise from instances where technically I’m not being grifted, but my time is wasted. A good example is my orthodontist, which has been calling me for 5-minute appointments trying to fix my bite for the last three months. I pay almost nothing for these appointments, and the end result is going to be a better bite, but I waste at least an hour for 5 minutes of appointment because that’s how their system is designed: to squeeze in a day as many patients as possible. It’s not a grift, but it is harmful to me, and I’m going to call it “clutter.”
See, it wasn’t enough that Design System University made me create an account on Teachable to consume five hours of content and endure promotional emails, but Teachable doesn’t have an accessible “Delete account” function. A bit of a red flag there, but we’ll assume the marketing guy chose the platform. It’s not like there are enough video hosting services, right?
The “meta” problem, if you will, is that only obsessive-compulsive people like me end up even finding out about “resources” like this, which are often marketed to organizations, who pay thousands and thousands of dollars for twenty hours of content as a way of “training” employees. This is the whole thing behind growth.design, for example; they don’t market themselves to individuals because they wouldn’t pay since most of their content could be re-created by anyone with a stable internet connection. People like me end up discovering these websites because we’re always looking to learn.
Enter: note-taking apps. Before Notion cluttered my functionalities with AI features, I liked it. But because I didn’t know how to manage my time, I wasted hours upon hours to take notes and document progress and “jot down some goals” and keep intricate spreadsheets for video games, companies, and cooking recipes. This is a problem because creating these personal knowledge databases and enmeshing with the insane plugin communities of more refined software like Obsidian takes more time than… applying the knowledge.
Knowledge doesn’t have a purpose outside of a specific context. Note taking apps, without a goal like creating a novel, or building a website, are meaningless, but they are marketed as a solution to people who procrastinate by switching between spreadsheets of tasks. It’s, obviously, not a grift, but the result is an almost ungodly amount of digital clutter that becomes impossible to sift through. That dashboard of 200 links? Yeah, in the context of a real-world product design project meandering through links is a distraction.
Circumventing the “list problem” is easy. Go online and find the most useful three books on the topic you’re trying to get better at, read them twice, and move on with your life. Most of your competition isn’t reading, for example, The Design of Everyday Things, they’re taking out-of-context quotes from YouTubers who pretend they’ve read it. Hooked, a good candidate for the most popular product design book at the moment, could be summarized in a blog post; of course nobody read the full book.
However, there is a certain knowledge base it’s difficult to move past if you want to go from “good” to “great.” Specializing in UI design, for example, will take you on a wild ride through the most boring and menial content you’ll see: articles, and unhinged, pixel-perfect sheets designed by people who sell courses that could be generated with Claude. It’s easy to git gud, it’s hard to get better than good, and the skill becomes circumventing the thousands voices claiming they have the solution. It’s just… well, it’s free for the first five hours, then you have to subscribe to an additional email list to access the secret Slack group that will share with you the top five email lists with more blog posts.
I’ve recently moved to a new apartment, and the clutter problem becomes apparent with physical stuff, to the point where I’m not sure what comes first: the compulsion to hoard bullshit, or the predatory business practices that led to those purchases in the first place. In the span of 18 months, I doubled the quantity of my bullshit. Most of it were things I thought I needed, that became a complete pain in the ass to haul to the 3rd floor, and a herculean challenge to find storage for.
I decided to boot up games to cope with the stress of moving to a new place and the inherent doubts about where you come from and where you’re going and the existential nightmare of living in the same town for almost thirty years. And it’s the fucking same! I played Far Cry: Primal, which is filled with clutter I need to collect for five experience points so that I could buy skill points to purchase the skill that lets me tame wild cats that I don’t need. I re-played Pathologic 2, which I love, which is cluttered with side characters that have no bearing to the story, and filled with children’s caches I need to search on Google for, so that I could get those damned Shmowders, so that I could keep Sticky alive. In the process, I’ve had to close up to five cookie prompts and refuse to subscribe to three email lists. At some point, Windows kindly lets me know there’s an update I don’t want, which I install immediately to shoo away the warning icon, then I restart my computer, and I wake up to Discord, which boots up automatically, showing a bunch of modals about some update I don’t care for. By the way, Chrome has an update I don’t want, be sure to restart, and we’ll reopen the tabs for you! I move on to Firefox, and attempt to login into my old apps, and half of them have 2FA that I didn’t consent to.
Lists are the bane of my existence, and it’s often the most common answer to most digital problems. Software like Notion exist to provide glorified lists of stuff, and managing them can quickly grow into unmanageable clutter. This problem extends beyond tasks and bleeds into every facet of someone’s digital life with saving content to “Watch later” and “Read later” lists.
Lists are only useful if all items in the list are useful. This is why to-do lists don’t work; you have no way of prioritizing the actions beforehand. This issue spider-webs itself in almost every video game that exists through the shittiest, most useless UX items in the world: the quest journals. They show up like to-do lists, with the most egregious examples showing up as checkboxes, as if players don’t know most of that is, quite literally, padding.
It’s interesting how video games, for as much flak as they get for “wasting people’s time”, reflect the way we normalize and enable obsessive-compulsive behavior disguised as “productivity hacks.” Pomodoro timers, another useless “hack”, is nothing more than a poor man’s roguelite run. Saving links compulsively in “later” lists is like taking as many quests as you can in RPGs. Kanban is the poor man’s Stardew Valley. And my personal favorite: the “second brain” bullshit, which should technically be a favorite of Europa Universalis players.
PKMS (personal knowledge management software) generally does one thing: provide lists of links within links. People play with them to re-create a universal interface for “accessing their brain.” In effect, it’s a video game for people who believe are too smart or grown-up for video games.
There’s a book I don’t remember the name of, that was used by SuperBunnyHop in his video about books used to understand Death Stranding. The book makes the argument that the most intelligent people evolved because they made everything into a game, and that the act of playing, and desiring to play, is what enables us to make better decisions.
I love Death Stranding because it’s the ultimate representation of this concept, without the insanely stressful gameplay of something like Pathologic 2. You’re playing as a glorified Glovo driver, a job you’d never take in real life if you had the option not to. But while playing as Sam, you’re gaming the shit out of deliveries because they are fun when there’s manageable risk and an interface that reminds you of every possible tip you need to make the trips.
A while ago, I had this epiphany that overshadows all the video game criticisms I ever made in my life: to not hate a video game I only need skippable cutscenes and keyboard shortucts displayed in the UI.
Skippable cutscenes are akin to the “content” I had the displeasure of consuming these past months. The video courses I mentioned before, designed by professionals who wanted to grow their reach, are meaningless cutscenes that don’t push my life plot forward; they’re just for the benefit of some dude on the other end of the world. And I can skip those. I don’t have to engage with them because that’s what the marketing tells me; I can re-read the basics until I know them by heart and I’ll be better than 90% of people anyway because most people don’t read.
The keyboard shortcuts, akin to a book of better practices when browsing the Internet, unfortunately, doesn’t exist. Google gradually takes away our ability to formulate this book of practices by imposing heavy limits on our abilities to block ads. I, because I didn’t know any better, turned to Mozilla because I was tired of the frequent Chrome updates and the lack of uBlockOrigin. Guess what? Mozilla’s business model is getting paid by Google for using the Google search bar as their default search.
And this doesn’t even solve the annoying issues. Ads are gone, for the most part, but… not really. Nowadays people disguise ads in content to the best of their abilities. A 12-minute YouTube video about something you can find on Wikipedia, that has a “sponsored by” section longer than this paragraph is a glorified ad. Cookie prompts add an additional layer of clutter and friction that’s frustrating to witness, and needs more advanced knowledge to work around.
Ok, so… less is more? I suppose. The problem isn’t that the majority of software is bloated and that the Internet is not user-friendly, but that eventually, bloat finds a way in every software or website, just like water always finds a crack to seep through. Bloat and clutter are the primordial chaos out of which all appearances of good UX stem from. With enough time, even the most functional solutions will become trash, and the designer’s efforts are more akin to damage control than solving problems.