Whataaabout, a curated list of activities for bored people
- A simple directory of activities to try when you’re bored. More than the product itself, this was an experiment: my first real hands-on run at basic development tools, from JavaScript to Git, GitHub and Vercel.
- Team
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- 1 product designer (me)
- 1 developer
- My role
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- UX/UI
- HTML and CSS
Problem
Goal
Once upon a time, back in 2023, in a world before AI was good and ChatGPT was just starting to get decent at generating images: I needed a small project to finally learn JavaScript, so I came up with this simple directory, a list of activities to try when you’re bored or just want some novelty — new hobbies, small challenges, things that don’t take much time and don’t require a lot of preparation.
Curating & building
I collected activity ideas in an organized, tagged Notion table. At the same time I was exploring ideas in Figma — I wanted a playful mood, and to focus the experience on one option at a time, to push the idea of "just pick one, don’t browse forever".
I then built the frontend of the site, and went on a journey trying to get ChatGPT’s then-new image generation to make people with no more than five fingers. I asked a developer friend for guidance on the JavaScript part, and ended up doing everything except that. What I did get out of it was a first real introduction to the tools around the code: my first time using Git, my first GitHub repo, and my first deploy on Vercel.
It’s live!
The website went live during the Christmas break, and I posted it on Hacker News, not expecting much. It ended up doing a lot better than I thought, with an unexpected wave of traffic for a few days.
