December 24, 2023

Horrible Web Designs

On December 14 I hosted a 5,000 ETB web dev competition in Addis Ababa Science and Technology University (AASTU) for all batches. The theme of the competition was Horrible Design and contestants were expected to make the most difficult to use, hedious looking, unintuitive, user-unfriendly, time wasting abomination of a website... and they didn't fail me!

This was what I told the contestants

When I look at your websites I want to gag and feel immense pain in my soul. I want my eyes to be in agony looking at your designs. Are you good at UI/UX design? Well throw that out the window. Do you like making people's digital life easier? Well throw that out the window as well. Do you follow good design and interaction guidelines? Throw that out the window!! Infact when I look at your designs, I want it to make me throw MY computer out the window!! Enjoy causing pain on all of us and go crazy with your creativity. Competition starts now and ends in 3 days. Have fun. 🥳

Who Participated?

During the competition students from freshman year to the graduating classes, from Addis Ababa Science and Technology University (AASTU) and Addis Ababa University (AAU) to dropouts, from software engineering and computer science to chemical engineering and electromechanical departments joined the contest.

Requirements

Must be an original design
You can be in teams or alone
Should be a single page website
Should include multiple sections within the page
You can use any framework or tool you're comfortable with
Should have multiple interactive elements like forms, buttons, hover effects, scroll effects and so forth
Should be hosted on either GitHub Pages, Vercel, Netlify or any other free hosting service.

Things to focus on

Design horribleness
Allow interaction but just agonizing
Content should be visible, just visibly painful
Non-conformity to standard design and UI/UX rules and trends
Adding your twists to original popular webpage components.

Submission and Deadline

Submission: Dec 17 12:00 local time.
Deadline: Dec 17 Midnight 6:00 LT

⚠️ Warning and Usage

Epileptic Warning
Volume Up for Full Experience
View on PC for full experience
Enable Pop Ups and JavaScript
Most components and contents on the websites are interactive, so hover everywhere, click on things and fill out forms

Here are the submissions...

Submission 1 - https://haileabt.github.io/pain

By Haileab Tesfaye & Ephrem Mandefro

"Don't ask what the webpage is about bro!"

Submission 2 - https://mesmerizing-ui-competition.vercel.app

By Amanuel Wonde

"I saw that it's hard to make a website the most hedious looking. I really loved the idea and it gave me time to think outside the real world work."