Quizzical
Quizzical is a trivia web application that lets users customize their quiz by selecting a category, difficulty, and question type before testing their knowledge with questions fetched from the Open Trivia Database. It was built as a solo project as part of the Scrimba Full Stack Developer Path. In my version of the project, I expanded the original application by adding quiz customization options, allowing users to instantly replay with the same settings or return to the configuration screen to start a new challenge.
Project Purpose and Goal
I built this project to strengthen my React fundamentals while gaining experience working with external APIs and asynchronous data fetching. My goal was to create an application that not only functioned correctly but also felt smooth and intuitive to use, with a focus on state management, conditional rendering, and user experience.
Spotlight
Although the application wasn't particularly difficult to build, one of the few challenges I encountered was working with the Open Trivia Database API, which returns questions containing HTML encoded characters. To display the questions correctly, I used the he package to decode the characters before rendering them in the application. It was a small but important detail that helped improve the overall user experience.
Lessons Learned
This project taught me that good user experience often comes from small decisions. Features like remembering the user's settings between games required more thought about state management than I initially expected. I also became more comfortable working with third-party APIs and handling data I don't control.
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