OK/Cancel: The 7th Issue Retrospective

In Unfiled on 2 November 2003. Tagged Unfiled.

On Sep 19th, I started school, left Trilogy, and started OK/Cancel.

Since a lot of my friends out of town (“town” being whatever city I happen to inhabit in a particular month) don’t get to hear my ranting on a daily basis (lucky you), I’ve been going on and on about OK/C and here’s some interesting notes about it.

Tom and I started the site thinking “Hey, it’ll be fun and it might catch on. We’ll start advertising it after 2, maybe 3 months when we have enough content that people know we’re here to stay and worth coming back for.”

Two weeks after we started, my classmate Joshua linked us. His blog is quite widely read and through him, an even larger distribution site, Matt Jones linked us. Coming onto week 3, we had 200 visitors (not hits) daily which already surpassed our expectations.

During this time, we were epitomizing incremental delivery. We released on the first week with static html. Two pages that linked to each other – the comic and the about page. I then spent a weekend learning all the hacks that Movable Type can do because it didn’t support weekly archiving on any day other than Monday out of the box. So I went into the code and modified how it calculated what a “week” was (it now thinks the start of the week is a Friday). Week 2 saw a basic MT build with archives. Week 3 saw proper comic navigation through the use of MT plugins like MTElse and subsequently, we added searching, mailing lists, ability to hide a portion of a long article and more.

Just prior to week 4, I had an assignment at school to write about an article I had read. I decided I’d write it on one of Joel on Software’s articles about UI for Designers. At the same time, the book had been reviewed at slashdot so we felt it appropriate to create a strip on the same vein. So the serious article combined with irreverent comic strip combination was born. We suspected that writing about Joel could lead to a link if he liked our site – and we told him about it. In anticipation of this possibility, we spent a weekend solidifying the infrastructure, adding the Links section and some of the features mentioned.

Oct 15th, my birthday, was when we saw a link from Joel. The traffic was already healthy and steadily increasing but Joel spiked us to a solid 6000 visitors that day alone. Because of the nature of internet links, that effect dropped off rapidly.

The week we released Joel’s comic, Don Norman, a well known usability expert and author of Design of Everyday Things, had come to speak to our class. I mentioned the comic to him and he asked that I forward the link to him. We were dreaming what a link from Don would be like and also felt it was appropriate to do a strip on his new focus: Emotion and Design.

Three days after Joel’s link, and before I could send an e-mail to Don to inform him of our strip, I received a brief e-mail from him: “Neat,” said the subject, “I like it. When can I buy the Tea Juicer?” I was quite surprised at this. For the next few hours, Tom and I discussed whether Norman would link us and if so, where he would even put it because unlike Joel, Norman’s site was not really a blog and didn’t have the real estate for linking to random sites.

We soon found that we had hit the proverbial holy grail of usability links. Jakob Nielsen, possibly the most read usability expert on the web, and Norman’s colleague and co-founder of NN/g, had linked us on his site.

Update: Don Norman has now also linked us!

“Ah, but now the danger is that people will say, “Hey Don Norman says it’s OK to make it pretty, so now we can forget all that usability stuff.” Sigh, that’s not what I had in mind, the danger is real — as is pointed out by this witty comic strip drawn by Kevin Cheng from London:
http://www.ok-cancel.com/archives/week_2003_10_17.html “

Readers of Nielsen are not as frequent as Joel on Software so the spike was not as pronounced but a steady steam of traffic came in.

Following these events, we received a fair bit of attention both on-line and through e-mail. Requests for OK/C T-shirts came in our inbox. User Experience magazine asked if we were interested in publishing in their quarterly magazine. The editor of Usability News gave a very kind review of our comic. Don Norman has been somewhat active in a discussion with Tom on our site, transforming our site into a discussion forum. Technorati tracked more and more blogs linking to us, many comparing us to Dilbert or User Friendly. More than a hundred people, most of whom I don’t know and some of whom I only know by reputation, have signed up for our weekly mailing list.

By the end of October, nearly 5Gb of our bandwidth had been used, and we averaged 1500 visitors a day even taking the two weeks of 200/day into account (so really, we averaged closer 2500/day). We’ve decided to just see if we can sustain the current traffic instead of bringing even more attention to ourselves. Most of the high profile links have now subsided and the onus is on us to continue to deliver. We’ve also applied to SXSW Interactive’s competition in a number of categories and hope to at least make finalist in that regard.

If this is what 7 weeks looks like, I hate to see our 383rd episode (I think the Simpson’s celebrated that particular landmark).

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