While exploring some aspects of Microsoft's LiveCommunications technologies, we recently stumbled across a broken link. Being that we love to improve 404 pages, Port80 saw something interesting -- a form field with the bad URL:
In this case, we see that the URL is provided and gives us a chance to edit it and then resubmit it. Now, you might ask what's the point, couldn't they have just gone to the URL bar and fixed it... au contraire mon frere -- most sites will have bounced you to a new 404 page, and you will have lost the URL that was the broken link culprit. Here they show the bad URL, and let us correct it right there. One tip, though: if we are getting focused on such basic user experience, maybe a button that says "Try Again" instead of GO would make sense.
Big gripe on the user side: in the case of this new find, we actually followed a link internally, and it triggered the 404. But, alas, we didn't type a bad URL! So in some sense asking me to fix the spelling is well... stupid and not my job as the user. To improve this, Microsoft might look at referrer headers. See if that it is from an internal link, don’t offer the misspelling. Instead, tell the user, “Hey, this link is broken, we have been alerted, and here is a link to go back to where you just came from, and here are other tools to go some place else...”
Lots of ideas here for how to fix error pages because
Custom Error 3.0 is finally almost out the door. Yes, we know we are always working on the other products, but we came back to this chestnut because, well, you wanted us to.