The Shuffle Button Taught Me More About My Site Than Any Analytics Dashboard
Every personal site I've ever built has had the same skeleton: a homepage that introduces me, a projects page that impresses me, an about page that embarrasses me slightly, and a navigation menu that assumes visitors think in categories. It took a month of handing strangers a shuffle button to realize how wrong that assumption was.
Here's how the experiment worked. I added a small dice icon to the corner of every page. Click it, and you'd land on a random page from my site — essays, dead project write-ups, a photo essay from a trip to Portland, a half-finished experiment I'd forgotten existed. No curation, no weighting, no logic. Just chaos with a favicon.
Then I watched.
Nobody Wants the Front Door
The pages I'd spent the most time polishing — the homepage hero, the carefully sequenced projects grid — got bypassed constantly when people arrived via shuffle. And here's the thing: those shuffled visitors stayed longer. Way longer. The average shuffle visitor viewed four pages. The menu-navigators viewed barely more than one.
That tracks with something I've noticed at dinner parties. If someone hands you a curated tour of their life, you nod politely and forget it. If you stumble onto a weird detail — a shelf of vintage synthesizers, a story about getting banned from a trivia league — you ask questions. Serendipity does the work that structure never will.
The Pages That Punch Above Their Weight
Three unexpected pages kept winning the shuffle lottery, in the sense that people who landed on them almost always clicked through to something else instead of closing the tab:
- A post-mortem on a project I abandoned. Turns out failure narratives beat success stories every time. People trust the mess.
- A short piece about my grandmother's recipe box. Completely unrelated to anything I do professionally. It didn't matter.
- My reading list, unannotated. Just titles. Strangers treated it like a personality test and messaged me about half the books.
Meanwhile, my flagship case study — the one with the polished graphics and the metrics — performed like a museum exhibit. People looked, nodded, and moved on.
What This Means for How We Build These Things
I'm not saying burn your navigation menu. Menus exist for a reason, and recruiters skimming at 11 PM on a Tuesday deserve a clear path to your work. But the shuffle experiment convinced me that most of us over-engineer the front of the site and underinvest everywhere else.
The menu tells visitors what you want them to see. The random corners tell them who you actually are. Both matter, but only one of them is currently getting any love.
So here's my revised theory of personal sites: think of yours less like a brochure and more like a used bookstore. The organization helps, sure, but people fall in love in the stacks — in the accidental finds, the weird shelf, the margin notes in a book nobody meant to sell.
The Button Stays
I'm keeping the dice icon. It costs nothing, visitors seem to love it, and every so often it reminds me that a page I wrote at 2 AM about a failed app is doing more storytelling work than anything I've carefully staged since.
If you've got a personal site gathering digital dust on its lesser pages, consider this your nudge. You don't need a shuffle button — though honestly, they're about twenty lines of code. You just need to accept that your story doesn't live where you filed it. It lives in the in-between stuff, the leftovers, the pages you almost deleted.
Strangers already know that. They've been telling me all month.
