The Virality of One Button

Whilst cooped up on my apartment during the ravaging of Hurricane Sandy, I took to work on a small personal project with a simple premise; There was to be one button, which would link out to useless, yet artistic websites. This project became The Useless Web.

The site was launched on November 05, 2012 with a single tweet and a link in a small subreddit, with a single follow up tweet the next day. This was enough to start the fire.

Within three weeks, the useless web had seen 2.7 million unique pageviews, an average bounce rate of 23% and had topped two larger subreddits. It even peaked at #3 on Hacker News. And received praise from both The Verge and Gizmodo. The button itself, had been pressed a total of 30 million times.

So, what do I attribute this success too? A collection of things. In my mind the useless web was a near flawless experience… and far more thought went into a single button than I had expected would, these are as follows:

Before interaction

The site was useable on a large variety of devices and browsers. It used a simple and responsive design. It was immediately obvious that you should press the button… even without reading any of the text.

The site was quick to load (hosted on amazon’s static servers) ~ and was never down.

Before the user had even clicked the button, the closely curated list of sites was ordered so that the “useless sites” I felt were best were at the top. If the user clicks the button, one of the top 6 sites would be selected at random and opened. This gave each user a similar, yet unique experience.

If the users device did not support flash, all “useless sites” which relied on flash were stripped from the list. Ensuring the experience would not be broken for anyone.

Everything at this stage was primed to get the audience to make that all important first click… after that commitment, there are no barriers left.

After interaction

After the user clicked, very little changed…. this was a driving point. After that first click, people would be hooked. The barriers are down, if they’ve enjoyed what they got, they’ll click again. On average people clicked 11 times, which was fantastic.

Sharing was visible, yet unobtrusive. I’ve got a firm belief that if people like something, they will share it. There’s no need to stuff it in their face.

Returning visitors

This was a tricky one, If visitors would return to the site, and were sent to the same sites they had already seen, they would immediately leave. As such, for supporting browsers, the list of visited sites was saved via html5 local storage. Therefore, only new sites would be delivered upon returning ~ and everyone would stay happy.

Misc

I also used this time to experiment with sharing buttons, and found that, by hiding both the Tweet count, and Facebook like count (24.7k and 340k respectively) the website maintains an air of “newness” ~ whereby completely new users would feel the need to share as if the site was brand new. I believe it still see’s around 30 new tweets per day, which itself is nothing to be scoffed at.

All in all, the project was a huge success. Yet in my mind there are no doubts that without these aspects all coming together to make one complete, unbroken experience. The Useless Web would still be sitting, collecting dust in the scary corners of the internet.