Smarter 404 Pages
The Cisco.com website team wanted to provide a "smart" 404 functionality on Cisco.com. Such functionality helps mitigate the frustration of broken links by providing suggestions based on the broken URL. They needed a new 404 page design that would showcase these dynamic recommendations.
Approach
Dynamic and truly informative 404 pages are rare and I believed that Cisco's users were unlikely to be familiar with the concept. Thus, just throwing suggestions at users was not going to be successful.
Instead, I focused on designing a new "smart" 404 page that clearly and simply explained what was going on and then presented valuable suggestions to users. I arrived at the design below after several rounds of iterative design and collaboration with the team.
Impact
The banner in the page design below immediately explains to the user that the page he or she is looking for is not available. When the system recognizes the URL, the title of the missing page is displayed for the user's reference.
Next, the "smart" suggestions, based on the broken URL, are offered to the user in plain language. Ideally he or she will see the same or a similar document at this point and carry on. The user may also click "View All…" to launch a search of Cisco.com for the document title.
If the suggestions do not pan out, the user is still offered links to the most commonly visited site areas lower in the page body and in the footer. With this "smart" 404 page in place, users ought never to hit dead ends when following broken links to Cisco.com pages.