Giving the 404 some personality
Nobody likes seeing a 404 page, it's like hitting a brick wall. With hundreds of thousands of pages on wayne.edu, it's bound to happen and our goal is to make it as unlikely as possible.
I was recently inspired by Renny Gleeson's TED talk, "404, the story of a page not found" (opens new window). It made me dive deeper in to our 404 experience.
# Too much useless information
I realized our 404 page had way too much copy on it. It was actually written around 2002 (almost 12 years ago) when we had far less pages and the visitor may have actually not known what to do next.
# How do people actually use the 404 page?
We have to admit, we have never really done user testing on our 404 page. In the past we have tried to hide the fact that the page even existed. All we have to rely on is our passive analytics to get insights.
# Our Real-time Dashboard
We combat most 404 errors with a real-time dashboard. The dashboard tracks more that just 404's and allows us to react to the pulse of what is happening as it is happening so we can fix or promote anything while it's hot.
# Google Analytics
The amount of copy on the 404 page was about the same as a typical page on our site. But if you take a look at the comparison below of all visits (to our top level pages) and only 404's for the past 30 days you'll see a striking difference.
Visitors are spending far less time on the 404 page, 69% less time. The bounce and exit rates are also 90% less than a typical page. What does this mean? They are hitting the page and doing one of two things, either hitting the "back" button or using the embedded search.
Unfortunately the way the 404 page was set up we weren't able to track what people were searching for and it goes off to an old Google Syndicated Search page which we don't control.
# Simplify and add personality
We decided to cut the text on the page to the bare minimum. This would give the visitor clear direction on what to do next.
We wanted to give the "brick wall" a little personality and express to the visitor that we felt their pain. Although it isn't anything revolutionary the simple fact seeing a sad person re-enforces that we are just as upset as they are.
We also changed the email address from "webmaster" to our main "web" account. When picturing a "webmaster" most people think of an IT geek sitting alone in a dark basement making sure all the servers are up and running. We wanted to lower the barrier of action, and although we do get emails to the webmaster account, we hope changing it to "Web" encourages more people to email us.
Lastly, we searched for other good examples and thumbing through the Flickr 404 Pool (opens new window) we found some real gems.
# A global roll out
Right now this new error page is only on the top level pages of wayne.edu but we'll soon be rolling it out to all the sites on campus. As we move to a more centralized Web experience we are creating more unified experiences across all our silo-ed websites.
View the live 404 page at: http://wayne.edu/404/