Annoying TrollTube

Initial Landing Page
User sign up page
This dialog pops up when a user tries to click anywhere

Inspiration

We were inspired by poorly designed websites and seek to use our knowledge and purposefully designed trolltube as an example of what not to do, and took it further to make it more annoying.

What it does

TrollTube is a video web application with Google Youtube API that seeks to be an example of what not to do based on several design decisions that we’ve made. The web application is populated with pop up dialogs, a main video player takes up the whole screen, covered by cards on relevant videos to the search.

This then brings us to a sign up page where take in user input, and only validate when the user clicks submit, with various fields that are not very intuitive or synced so as to further complicate the process.

Additional buttons that seek to confuse also causes pop ups of warning messages similar to that of webpages with poorly designed placement of buttons, and even advertisements that may lead users to clicking the wrong thing.

How I built it

We built the web app using React. It provides us with a simple way to get started and there are many libraries that provide extra functionality to it such as Material UI. We then deployed the App to Github Pages.

Challenges I ran into

Some of the styling for our React components did not appear as we wanted and it took quite a while to find the cause of the issue.

Doing the sign up forms manually and validating through Regex is also highly complicated and highlights the benefits of using libraries such as Redux-Forms where validation is easily done.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are proud that we managed to brainstorm and develop and deploy a working prototype in less than 24 hours.

What I learned

The team last used React about half a year ago so this project helped to brush up our skills and put into practice the usage of React with Hooks and Material UI.

Furthermore, working together online posed additional challenges as it was hard to communicate our ideas properly at times. We had to find other ways of expressing our thoughts such as through screen sharing or video calls.

What's next for Annoying TrollTube

We do not really have anything concrete planned for the future but we hope this project helps to remind other web developers of the common annoyances faced by users. One feature that we did not develop would be to take in user input for search and scramble search results based on their search term to potentially annoy more.