What your 404 page says about you

One of the things I love designing most on the web is a 404 page. So much so that my friends now make jokes about it — because I do it quite often and spend a lot of time on them. What’s great about a 404 page is that you can express a bit of creativity and brand identity on a site that may not naturally fit with an over-the-top visual design focus. It’s like a sandbox project designers and developers can collaborate on.

Why do we need glossy 404 pages though? In fact, why do we need error pages in general?

Well, imagine you’re a user of a website or web app, and maybe you’ve clicked an old, dead link, or perhaps there’s a server error right now and the page you need simply can’t be loaded. By default, you’ll get a pretty boring/unhelpful error that most likely only a developer of the site would understand. That’s not great for showcasing to your end user — especially when they’re already facing problems using your product — so this dull error page can seriously hurt a user’s relationship with your site.

One of Jakob Nielsen’s 10 heuristic principles for user interface design is ‘Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors’, and a 404 page is a great example of when we could see this in action. The user may have done something as small as mistyping a word in a URL, however without anything to suggest that, they may never even think of it. However, if we can nudge them in the right direction at the point of trouble, they might be able to carry on with their journey without any worry, or have to contact your customer service team with an issue that they realistically don’t need to be spending their time on.

Another reason for developing a useful/good-looking 404 page is that it shows you care about every user on your site, even the ones who get lost along the way. In real terms, only a small amount of your users will ever land on your 404 page, however if they can see that you’ve spent time there making sure their journey will be smooth, it gives a great impression of your site and of you as a brand. You care so much about providing a pleasant experience that you’d dedicate time and effort into a page that only a small percentage of your users will ever see.