404s & Heartbreak
Problem
It's Thursday night. You're interested in spending Friday or Saturday night in the city. After a few searches, you find a link to a potentially interesting event. It's time to see where it is, when it starts, and gather some details. Unbeknownst to you, some intern creating the event mis-typed the URL. Or worse, a blogger made a typo when linking to the event.
Upon arriving at the site, you only find three monstrous, grotesque digits staring you in the face: 404.
What does that even mean? How can you get over this hurdle? Do you use the tiny search bar to re-type the name of the event? As a result, you’re gotten flustered and forgotten what the event was called!
Research
When researching how most sites handle the infamous page-not-found error, I quickly realized that many companies' web-teams fall victim to what Made to Stick authors, Chip and Dan Heath, constantly refer to as "the curse of knowledge.”
They've become so accustomed to discussing the 404 error with their developers that the term is now second nature to them. How could anyone not know what a 404 error is? So they come up with a cute idea to dress up the numerals in a pirate hat, sink dozens of hours into designing and illustrating that design only to ultimately scare away traffic. Instead of helping users, the trend seems to be "how can we make them giggle or make an error-page other creatives will pine over?" rather than "how can we keep them engaged with our site instead of using that effortless back button?"
Concept
Why not serve the user relevant content? Certainly, this is possible with modern, well-built and/or custom content management systems.
If they're coming to your site from a broken link to a news article, why not take them to the main news page with a little message stating the mistake and allow them to spot the correct post? If they tried to access an event, why not take them to an article on the hottest local events this weekend to pique their interest and get them to register through your site?
Prototype
