Universal Principles of UX

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Broken pages shouldn’t feel broken.

If a user mistypes the URL or tries to access a page that requires a log in, they’ll end up on a 404 page. If a marketeer accidentally sends out an email campaign with a nonexistent link, people will end up on a 404 page. If the page was deleted or moved but the search engine still has it indexed or the user has it saved as a bookmark, people will end up on a 404 page. A 404 page is the most common error people see on the internet.

One of my favorite internet myths is that the 404 page error was named after Tim Berners-Lee’s office while he was working at CERN in the early ‘80s on what would become the World Wide Web. According to lore, whenever people would go to his office, he frequently couldn’t be found, ...