All posts tagged Degree Project

On April 2, 2012, I published a project to the web called Startups, this is how design works. I spent four months researching Designer Founders, interviewing some industry-leading designers, writing, researching some more, and designing the layout for this story. I wanted to explore the intersection of design and startups, and encourage people to learn more about designer founders and help them make their first crucial design hires. Forbes is calling this The Era of Design – I’m compelled to agree.

I want to be as transparent as possible with my data. I’ve seen a few people on Hacker News share numbers, and those people are awesome… I think it’s great to see the numbers behind things that work. Hopefully my Google Analytics data will continue down that path of shedding light on little successes and making web metrics a bit more transparent.

The project was, quite literally, an overnight sensation. At 1am EST on April 3, my phone went berserk.

I was getting about a dozen mentions per second via Tweetbot on my iPhone. I instantly checked my analytics, and was able to snap this screenshot showing the exact moment the website went viral. The inflection point was clearly on Twitter, but I can’t identify the individual tweet that caused it. Thank you, to whoever it was.

Totals

These numbers represent traffic between April 1, 2012 and May 15, 2012.

Visits: 384,550
Unique Visitors:261,826
Pageviews: 415,027
Pages/Visit: 1.08
Avg. Visit Duration:00:00:34
Bounce Rate: 93.62%
% New Visits: 67.71%

Goals

I’ll also be transparent about my goals. I set a goal of 500,000 visits within 14 days… it was incredibly aggressive. It basically meant that it ‘had to go viral’ otherwise I’d be looking at far less traffic, probably between 3,000 – 5,000 hits. It also meant that I needed to get a ton of press… something I had never been able to do before. Here’s what happened instead:

229,372 visits in 14 days. My personal goal was basically contingent on getting coverage from TechCrunch. I contacted them and Co.Design, but neither covered the story. That’s fine… maybe I’ll have better connections for my next project. I also wish that Leo Widrich‘s blog post “7 Steps To Get Press Coverage For Your Startup” had existed a month and a half ago. C’est la vie.

Awesome stuff happened

The story WAS covered by TNW (Thank you again, Harrison Weber), Graphic Optimism, The Industry, and was awarded an Awwwards Site of the Day (thank you, whoever submitted it?!)

I’ve received a ton of emails, twitter followers, and have had some great discussions with people. I’m so excited that the message is thriving, and that I played a part in reaching the non-designers. As more designers found and co-found companies, I think it’s going to seem much more ‘normal’ in the coming months / years. It’s great to see so many people psyched about it on Twitter… I read through pretty much every one of the  12,632 tweets. Thank you.

Not so awesome stuff happened too

My website was shared everywhere, including Hacker News, Reddit, and Metafilter. I invite you to read through the comments.

I’m all for constructive feedback… designers need to be able to thrive on it. It improves the thinking behind my work and anything that comes after… sometimes, it’s a pretty big pill to swallow. People saying “This is a disaster design-wise” and “This is shit” is never pleasant to read about your work. In the end though, I’m glad it happened. Who was it who said “If no one hates you, you’re doing something wrong”?

I did silently act upon the constructive feedback, though. The fonts I used really did look like absolute shit on Chrome for Windows. It’s something I didn’t adequately test before launching with Google Web Fonts, and that’s my fault. I switched to using locally-hosted fonts instead, and the problem was completely resolved. Good times.

Social engagement a go-go

Twitter was pretty instrumental to the virility of this site. 45 days later, and I’m still getting Mention notifications on my phone. I still haven’t turned back on the alert sound.

I came across a Wikipedia article about the “1% Rule” as applied to social engagement online.

The 1% rule states that the number of people who create content on the Internet represents approximately 1% (or less) of the people actually viewing that content (for example, for every person who posts on a forum, generally about 99 other people are viewing that forum but not posting).

Here are my results from the last 30 days (I wish I had screenshotted this 15 days ago)

Google Analytics
 Topsy social interaction data

Interestingly enough, it seems that only 0.25% of visitors engaged in social interaction on Twitter on the most active day. Overall, only about 0.50% of visitors engaged on Twitter. Compare that to Facebook interaction, 0.84% of visitors Liked my page. Seems pretty close to the projected 1%, but I wonder why my numbers were so much lower. Next time, I’m going to spend a fair amount of time thinking about how to better encourage social interaction to get closer to that 1%. KISSmetrics seems to have a few ideas… Get More Tweets: 5 UX Tips for Boosting Your Site’s Virality

Overall, I think it’s a good benchmark to see how well others are doing.

Sum up

I hope this kind of post continues to urge more people to be transparent about their numbers. It’s an interesting metric to compare, and usually held pretty closely to one’s chest. I like sharing, especially when I feel like I’ve done something right… I hope this helps someone else.