Happy birthday to the UX Drinking Game!

I’ve been running the UX Drinking Game for a year as of tomorrow. It’s a mobile application for the iPhone, a mobile website using jQuery Mobile and a traditional website. The feature set doesn’t match between the different platforms, but you can still browse content.

I’ve created some spinoffs that haven’t taken off (Startup Drinking Game, Apple Drinking Game, Dating Drinking Game and The Big Idea List), but I’ve been collecting interesting data that has a lot of value to me learning about the audience. It’s fun creating an idea, launching it, and seeing how the users have fun with it.

Here are some stats over the last 30 days, 2,500 unique users and 17,000 page views that you might find interesting:

• There are 567 user submitted reasons to drink, and roughly 85 percent of them were submitted by people other than me. That’s a lot of drinking by User Experience Designers. Some of them are really funny.
• Over 27 percent of the visitors visit the UX Drinking Game from a mobile device. Mobile is defined as tablets and smartphones, so anything that isn’t a laptop or desktop. A lot of that traffic (it seems to be half) is consumed by Flipboard pulling content into their cache. If my numbers are right — they don’t show up in Google Analytics but I do capture my own data — about 50 percent of all mobile traffic is related to Flipboard.
• Android comprises one-fifth of the mobile users. iOS will rule the roost for a long time.
• The number of pages per visitor hovers around 8.8 pages. That’s relatively high, increased by actually decreasing usability and turning the site into a discovery platform. This is much higher than the 5 pages per visitor I was doing earlier in the year. I fiddled with the site design to get the numbers up.
• Site traffic only two pages per visitor for mobile devices. I have to work on increasing that.
• Most of the referred users come from Twitter, but only average 5 pages per visit. Ironically, those that come from Facebook average nearly 10.5 pages per visit, so I might do some things to increase Facebook engagement.
• Facebook as a mobile platform as a growing by leaps and bouns. One-third of the users that come from Facebook do so from a mobile device. For Facebook, this is non-monetized traffic. Like has been said, the next social network is going to be primarily mobile, and harder to monetize than social networks now. Scary thought.
• Visitors from Usability Counts average 12 pages per visit. That’s huge, considering how little real estate I dedicate to it from the blog.
• 50 percent of the traffic comes from referrals. Almost none of that is from Google (A total of 10 unique users). Double that to get the LinkedIn numbers, which is why I killed the LinkedIn sharing button.
• Engagement isn’t very good on the iPhone Application. People download it and forget about it. Roughly 2 percent of all site traffic is from the iPhone application. It’s cool to build an app, but hard to keep users interested unless it’s a true social game or utility like Weather. iPhone applications can be expensive if you have to hire a developer.
• Those 10 users that have a Blackberry? Time to upgrade, yo.