We’ve looked at lots of error 404′s and here’s our list of the best 40 we could find, scored in no particular order on the basis either good design, good copy, humour, originality, customer engagement or a combination of all of these.

Error 404 pages – otherwise known as page missing or page not found – are an inevitable part of web design and search engine optimisation.

Savvy marketers and designers know that investing a little extra time in designing and writing content for error 404 pages can pay dividends in terms of engaging users and showing off a bit of brand personality.

We’ve looked at lots of error 404′s and here’s our list of the best 40 we could find, scored in no particular order on the basis of either good design, good copy, humour, originality, customer engagement or a combination of all of these.

Most of the companies I’ve worked with have focused large amounts of resource on getting their website UX right and of course this makes perfect sense when the site is a key customer-facing channel. Not only because customers are obviously vital to any business, but also because it’s easy to build a business case around measurable KPIs (key performance indicators) such as increases in traffic, engagement or revenue.

Businesses, especially large ones, love measurable business cases which can make it hard to get resources to do work where measurement is less easy, as is very often the case with internal systems. This is doubly so when it comes to justifying UX work on these systems as UX in this case acts mainly to reduce hidden costs, which are by their very nature hard to measure objectively.

As a result, internal systems are almost always spec’ed from the viewpoint of the functionality required to do the particular job, with little thought given to the interface, apart, perhaps, for a web designer to be involved as the project nears completion to “do the colouring in” (as a software architect once said to me), by which time, it’s way too late to make it useable.

Like website development, internal system usability works best when it’s designed in from the start, rather than grafted on as an afterthought.

Hidden costs of poor UX

Perhaps the most obvious hidden cost is that of training. No matter how good an internal system is, users are going to need training before they can use it and, once trained, it’s going to take them time to become expert at it. So, improving a system’s usability will reduce the amount of training required and the time it takes for users to reach full productivity. This in turn feeds through into all sorts of other benefits, for example freeing up management time from inducting new staff and firefighting system issues.

Good UX also reduces the time taken to do particular tasks and the difficulty of doing them. The nature of internal systems is that the tasks users perform on them are often repetitive, so small changes in UX can have a big effect on staff productivity. That 4-click user journey that the project team picked over the 3-click one in order to minimise development time is a whole different prospect viewed through the eyes of the person who has to follow it 500 times a day.

Task duration and difficulty also feeds through to staff morale, which can in turn affect customer confidence. How often have you rung a call centre only for the operator to tell you, with barely disguised exasperation in their voice, that “their system is running slowly at the moment”? Staff morale is also a significant factor in staff retention and doing things to improve the one will help improve the other.

Poor data quality

Poor UX can also affect the quality of data in the system. I once came across a system where disabling an item in a list didn’t remove it from the list. As a result, the operators had come up with the ingenious workaround of adding the letter “z” at the front of the name of the item when they disabled it.  Since the list was sorted alphabetically, this caused disabled items to be moved to the bottom of the list and therefore out of the operator’s way for most of the tasks they needed to perform.

Although this worked well for the operators’ day-to-day needs, this low-level degradation of data caused no end of problems when it came time to upgrade the system and a chunk of development time had to be allocated to cleaning the data.

Ultimately, the people at the sharp end who are actually using these systems often have a hard enough job keeping themselves engaged with the mundane and repetitive nature of their work, without having the constant low-level frustration that accompanies a poor user experience.

Improving the UX of these systems will not only boost their morale, but also reduce a business’s cost base and in the current economic climate, that has to be a good thing.

This article was written by Rupert Hughes of Firehorse Digital.

Jim Sterne reports on the The Feedback Loop Gap where organisations have web analytics data but they rarely act on it.

In Jim Sterne’s words:

We have the data, we have the pretty reports, but we do not have an educated team made up of technical and business people who can take the resulting statistics and turn them into meaningful plans.

In my travels I have found that organisations rarely look at their web analytics data let alone act on it in a structured way to improve the user experience, conversion rates and possible ROI or revenue.

Organisations that do look at their analytics, tend to focus on channel measurement (i.e. what channels are driving traffic – or conversions – assuming goals have been set up) or most popular keyphrases or content.

But clearly the power of web analytics data is the interpretation of data and then the execution of that data by way of website enhancements and modifications.

As Jim Sterne’s reports, this requires

a team made up of information system, designers and business people [to] map out the changes necessary to improve usability, increase customer satisfaction, and boost revenue.

At its best an aphorism neatly encapsulates a complicated concept in a few short words. Over my years in the world of web user experience, I’ve come across two (four words in each) that really help to explain what UX is all about and which should be tattooed on the insides of the eyelids of web designers, information architects, software developers, copywriters and anyone else involved in the creation of websites.

Back in the late 90s, when Netscape Navigator was the browser du jour and every second person in a Soho wine bar was an Internet entrepreneur, I often found myself in meetings cast in the role of user champion. This usually entailed sparring with the IT department whilst trying to articulate why their latest web app was not going to work for anyone who hadn’t been looking over the shoulder of the developer coding the software.

User experience as a web discipline hadn’t really been invented then, so more often than not this meant falling back on the language of PC interface design and talking about subjective, half-understood concepts like user-friendliness and intuitive design. The more enlightened people realised that to make something work well you had to put yourself in the heads of people who hadn’t had the benefit of a computer science degree and 5 years’ mucking around with a 14.4k modem, but many saw this as a dark art best left to actors and con artists.

Don’t Make Me Think
Then, in 2000, Steve Krug brought out his seminal book on website usability which in the four short words of its title beautifully captured the essence of usability in a way that even the most logical mind could understand and relate to.
Don’t Make Me Think suddenly made it easy to explain interface design and, as importantly, provided a framework for how to get there. The book’s accessible style makes it easy to read and it’s something I recommend to anyone new to web UX.

First, Do No Harm
The second aphorism actually comes from the medical world. I first heard it applied to web usability in a seminar given by Bruce Tognazzini of the Nielsen Norman Group, back in 2007. Where “Don’t make me think” focuses the mind on interface design, First, Do No Harm relates much more to the functional, hidden components of a website; the things that make a site seem intuitive and simple to use and the kinds of thing that users only notice when they’re not happening.

The most obvious examples of sites causing harm relate to forms, such things as making a user retype an entire form when the submission has failed due to a problem in a single field (thankfully something you see considerably less of these days). Causes of harm can be minimised by the use of session cookies so, for example, when a clothing website’s customer puts a size 12 dress in her shopping basket, the site should remember what size she is when she later adds a cardigan to her order and not force her to retype it.

The most useful thing about these two sayings is that they’re great sanity checkers. Working on a website, by its very nature makes you an expert user (especially if you’ve specced or built the site) and it can be hard to get sufficient perspective to see whether less knowledgeable users will be able to use it. That perspective is much easier to find if at every stage of the design process, from flat visual through functional prototype to release candidate, you ask yourself:  “How much do I have to think about using it?” and “Where am I doing harm?”.

There’s a light-bulb moment in many people’s business lives when the Pareto principle hits home and they realise that, if they’re clever, they can in future get away with only ever doing 80% of a job. Working for a large corporate in a previous life, I used to hear this time and again trotted out in meetings as a reason for not doing more work on a project: “We’ve done enough to target the crucial 20%, so let’s move on to the next thing” or (and a particular favourite of mine) “If you descope your requirements, can you do 80% of them with only 20% of the resource?” (in practice, this usually meant removing the 20% of the requirements that turned a web project from being something that worked into something that was a joy to use).

The usual justification is one of corporate efficiency and cost control and, as often happens when managers focus solely on the internal workings of their company, the needs of the customer –generally the reason the company exists in the first place – get lost. It’s a rare company indeed where the person or team responsible for the user experience has a powerful enough voice to withstand the combined might of those responsible for finance and project management.

Businesses that put UX first
Of course there are some exceptions, and I don’t just mean the obviously design-led ones like Apple. Companies at the sharp end of customer service usually have a much more robust view of the customer experience. If a customer has a poor experience in a restaurant, a well-run establishment will move quickly to rectify the issue with an offer of a free drink, free pudding or, if the experience is truly dreadful, a completely free meal. They’ll then work hard to ensure that the cause of that poor experience won’t happen again.

Good restaurants don’t base their customer’s experience on whether or not their customer falls into that magic 20% who eat lobster and foie gras and drink from the end of the wine list where three or four figures appear after the pound sign. They set out to delight everyone, because they know that their success depends on that and that tonight’s table for 2 could turn into a birthday party for 30 in a couple of months’ time. More to the point, they get instant feedback from the size of the tips, the happy smiling faces and ultimately the same faces coming back through the door time after time.

How website UX can learn from good restaurants
Website UX has access to this kind of feedback too. Online users leave behind them a trail of pages they’ve visited, forms they’ve filled in and purchases they’ve successfully negotiated. All of these things will show up in any decent analytics software and back in my corporate life, I found that a reasoned argument backed up by real stats from the site occasionally won the day against the massed ranks of Finance and Project Management bristling with sharpened Pareto principles.

Where Pareto does help your UX
When you get down to it, great UX actually comes from a reverse application of the Pareto principle. The 20% of your users who generate the 80% of whatever the positive outcome is on your website are almost certainly your loyal users. They’re likely to be the ones responsible for your current success but you probably don’t need to work too hard to convince them to stay with you. A great user experience comes when you start designing websites for the “edge cases”, the people who don’t use the site often or at all. These are the ones where your growth is likely to come from and you’ll find them in the 80%.

This post was written by Rupert Hughes of Firehorse Digital

A quick check of Google shows 148 million results for “User Experience”, and more sites and blogs are popping up everyday. With so many to choose from, it can be hard to sort the wheat from the chaff, so here are 10 tried and tested sites that we keep returning to for guidelines, tools and sources of inspiration from the world of usability and user experience.
1. Useit.com: Jakob Nielsen’s Website
In existence since 1995, this is the original online usability resource from one of the forefathers of online usability. If you’ve got a usability issue or want to know the latest thinking on practically any UX-related subject, then you’ll find something here. It’s worth signing up for the Alertbox email too. The site’s look and feel is also an object lesson in what happens if you let usability principles alone drive website design.

2. Research Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines
Compiled by the United States Department of Health and Human Services, this library of pdfs provides 209 guidelines on all aspects of web design and usability. The material was last updated in 2006, so hasn’t kept up with technology improvements (e.g. it refers to 90% of web users being on 1024×768 resolution monitors), but the general principles are sound and still worth referring to.

3. Functioning Form – User Experience Diagrams
A great source of visuals for presentation or inspiration. There’s diagrams here that help explain most usability concepts. I’ve found printing out a few pertinent ones and scattering them around the walls of the design department to be a great way to keep web designers’ minds focused on their user.

4. Usability Net: Methods Table
A simply fantastic resource to help you decide on the best usability techniques to use for any given project. You define your project by 3 simple criteria and the site highlights the methods that’ll work best for your situation. You can then click through to read a full write-up of what’s involved in each method.

5. OptimalSort
Card sorting’s a great way to develop your information architecture and this site lets you do your card sorting online. Particularly good if you need to get perspectives from a widely distributed group of people and haven’t got the resources to visit them all. You can sign up for free and use it for small projects, but to get the most out of it, you need to pay.

6. Boxesandarrows
Online journal for all types of web design issues, but with particular focus on information architecture and interaction design. Great source of new thinking and opinion.

7. Business as a Design Experience
Video of an inspiring and insightful seminar given by Jesse James Garrett (founder of Adaptive Path and author of The Elements of User Experience) in 2007. Great resource for anyone trying to explain to senior management in a large corporate why “experience” should be at the heart of everything. If you don’t already know why you should care about user experience, then you should watch this.

8. Disambiguity
Leisa Reichelt’s blog about her usability work and general UX issues. Good source of opinion and ideas frequented by a large community of usability professionals.

9. Juicy Studio’s Readability Test
Excellent online tool for determining the readability of any page on your website. Great for finding out whether your content can be properly understood by your target audience and as a way of checking that your copywriters are doing a good job.

10. Accessify
If your site’s not accessible, then it’s also not fully usable. Accessify has lots of great information on accessibility issues and a great set of tools to help you build, maintain and test accessible web sites.

Your site’s user experience (UX) is working to create loyalty from the moment a user lands on your site, but in the Retention phase, it’s not just your site’s UX that matters.

Now you’ve converted your carefully acquired and cleverly engaged customers, the final step in the customer life cycle is to hang onto them. User loyalty is not only a vindication of a great customer experience, it’s also vital to a successful business because, as Frederick Reichheld (author of The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits and Lasting Value) established in the mid 90s, the cost of acquiring new customers is around five times that of servicing existing ones.

Registration & Personalisation
Your site’s user experience (UX) begins influencing your user’s loyalty from the moment they reach the site. Not just because a better experience makes them more likely to return, but also through direct retention factors such as how easy your registration process is and whether the reasons to register and opt-in to further communication are compelling and clear enough.

If you’re doing ecommerce where registration is a necessary part of the purchasing journey, then this is simple enough (but keep in mind good Conversion UX). If registration is less integral to your site experience, then make the “Register” link easy to find. Studies show that users search the edges of a web page for subscribe/register information, so place it there and put it in a global navigation element so that it’s available from every page. Then seed your content with reasons why the user might want to register.

Good form design is essential and since you’re going to need an email address and a unique username, why not make the email address the username? That makes one less field for the user to fill in, is already a unique value and pretty much guarantees a username they will remember rather than names of the “dave-y24530″ variety that many sites offer as less-than-helpful suggestion.

Once someone’s registered, personalise their experience on your site:

• If you have their name, use it!
• Offer users information that’s relevant to what you know about them and encourage them to provide you with more. They will if you can demonstrate the value to them.
• Use cookies to store some of their personal information (name, location, what they looked at on their last visit, etc.), so they don’t have to sign in every time. But, make sure you require a log in before they can access any private or secure details.

Offline Customer Experience
In the Retention phase, your off-line customer experience has a big part to play too. A study in the 90s found that 96% of customers who received their web order on time said they were “likely” or “very likely” to use that site again (See Jakob Nielsen on Loyalty on the Web for more details). That principle is still true today: if you can’t carry great site UX through to your off-line processes, then you won’t hang on to your customers.

Assuming though that your on and off-line UX is great, then there’s a rapidly increasing number of methods for encouraging return visits to your site from “social media” sites such as Facebook or, Twitter. You have less control of the UX here as you’re operating in someone else’s environment, so the key to maintaining a consistent experience will be in the quality of your copy (quite a challenge in Twitter!) and information scent.

Email marketing
For many site owners the key retention method is likely to be email marketing. This presents some big challenges for good user experience, since the medium is naturally more intrusive than a website. You therefore need to make sure you have a valuable message, so your mail is not immediately deleted or unsubscribed from. You’re also competing with all the other marketing messages users get every day, so you need to stand out. Here’s a few tips:

• Stick to the frequency agreed when users signed up. If it’s a monthly newsletter, don’t send it more often.
• Make sure you have something worth saying. Users will quickly stop opening mails that are just an excuse for the marketing department to flex their copywriting skills.
• Try to send it at the same time, every time, so your users fit it into their schedule. If it’s a daily business bulletin, make sure it’s arriving in inboxes around 9 am on business days.
• Write a great subject line. Think of it like a headline in a newspaper. It’s the most important piece of content, because a good one makes your mail more likely to be opened. Keep it to no more than 60 characters to ensure it displays in most email clients.
• Test, test, test. Email clients all differ in the way they render HTML and most are considerably less sophisticated than web browsers. So make sure your mail displays properly (or at least degrades gracefully) in the popular email programs (e.g. Outlook, Eudora, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, etc.). Particularly check that it works if images are switched off as many email clients block these by default nowadays.
• When writing your email content, follow the same principles of scannability and information scent that you would for a web page.
• Make sure you add some trackable parameters to the links from your email so that you can see which ones are generating traffic and how much.

Retaining customers, ultimately makes for a successful business and, if you’ve read all four posts in this series you’ll have seen how getting your UX right at each stage of the customer life cycle will help you achieve that goal. So, don’t just leave UX in the hands of your web designers. To be really successful, great UX should apply through every touchpoint that a customer has with an organisation and that only really works when everyone within that organisation has the customer in mind in everything that they do.

This article was written by Rupert Hughes of Firehorse Digital

Your site’s user experience (UX) in the Conversion phase is more important than any other, since it’s the experience they’ll remember.

With users acquired and engaged, your site’s UX now goes to work turning them into users with some value to you, be that as customers, sales leads, subscribers, or some other user-type appropriate to your business model.
Identifying that user-type is an important part of optimising your UX for conversion as, like any kind of journey, you need to know your destination in order to work out how to get there. So, before you even start thinking about Conversion UX, work out what you want users to do and if it’s more than one thing, work out what the hierarchy of those goals should be.

Peak End Theory
It’s worth considering Peak-End theory for a moment. Attributed to psychologist Daniel Kahneman, this is the idea that human beings only recall the peak and end events of any experience, whether pleasant or unpleasant.

Your users will likely have their peak and end experiences with your website during the Conversion phase, so it’s crucial to get the UX in this phase right, not only because it will lead to successful conversions but also because it will inform your customers’ overall view of your site. In a recent survey by Redshift Research & Maxymiser 69% of respondents said they would not return to a website if the purchasing process was unsatisfactory.

Online Selling
A website typically fails when it is thought of as a mere online product brochure and order form. Try thinking of your site as an online sales or customer services person. Does the UX on your site stand up to comparison with the way your company interacts with customers in the real world? It should guide users in the direction you want them to go, answering questions and overcoming objections before they are made.

Of course, the UX factors that affected Acquisition and Engagement, such as information scent and compelling content, apply just as well to Conversion, but the critical factors for good conversion are a simple user journey and great form design.

User Journey Checkpoints

• The shorter the better. Every new page is another one where some users may drop out. AJAX is great for reducing the number of page loads but doesn’t necessarily shorten the user journey.
• Make it easy for users to find the product or service they’re after. If you have different kinds of user, help them identify themselves when they enter the site so you can direct them straight to the content that applies to them.
• For ecommerce sites, keep your checkout pages simple. Don’t distract users with offers of new products until they’re fully committed to buying what’s already in their basket. Tell them up front how many steps the process has and then show a progress bar to keep them oriented.
• Search for the seducible moments in your user journey to put content in front of users when they’re susceptible to it.
• Encourage users to register by explaining the benefits. Don’t force them.

Form Design Checkpoints

• Auto populate fields as much as possible. Make it easy for Google AutoFill to work.
• Don’t collect information you don’t need or which you can’t adequately explain the reason for. The fewer fields you have the lower the form’s drop-out rate will be.
• Don’t overdo mandatory fields.
• Make sure your fields are big enough to accept the input you’re asking for.
• Write error messages that make sense and identify which part of the form is affected. Users won’t hunt for the faint red outline on an empty mandatory field, you need to make it obvious.
• Do basic data-format checking on the page. If your database will only accept passwords with 9 characters then use javascript to count the characters before submitting the page. Don’t make users wait for a page reload to see the error.

Iterate, iterate, iterate
Set up conversion funnels in your web analytics and use these to see where users are leaving your site. The more sophisticated web analytics packages will even tell you which field of a form a user gave up on. When you find an issue, make a change and watch your analytics for the effect, digest that information and then change again. (Don’t change too much though or you won’t be able to tell which change caused the effect). Keep iterating until you’re happy with the success rate of the page. Better still, do some A/B testing with two different versions of a page (this is very effective for pay-per-click landing pages) to see what content and design your users are most responsive to.

Great UX during the Conversion phase of the customer life cycle will make your users more likely to return and therefore allow you to consider how you increase the average value of each one. UX has a part to play here too and we’ll look at that next week in the final post in this series when we consider the Retention phase.

This article was authored by Rupert Hughes of Firehorse Digital.

From the moment a user clicks on your perfectly crafted, scent-rich link the engagement clock (actually more of a stopwatch) is ticking.

Following on from last week’s post on how user experience (UX) affects online customer acquisition, this week’s looks at the next stage in the online customer journey: Engagement.

What is user engagement?
This is the ephemeral process taking place inside a user’s head within the first few seconds of clicking a link which decides whether they stay with you or click “Back” to find a better answer to their query.

In websites, as in real life, first impressions matter.
Engagement is at work before a user even reaches your site. They’ll already have some expectations of success set up by the content of the link they’ve clicked on or their previous experience with your brand, so the page they land on had better meet those expectations or they’ll be off. In the approximate order that they affect users, here are the UX engagement factors for those first few seconds:

Download speed
OK, so most of your users now have broadband, but that’s no excuse for a page that’s so bloated with stylesheets and javascript that it takes 5 seconds to download. That might have been acceptable when the internet resounded to the whistles and beeps of the 56k modem, but the broadband surfer demands instant gratification and that means being able to interact with the page within a second.

Design
Design matters and human beings absorb design factors at a subliminal level. Usability gurus sometimes argue that users are only after information and design is secondary, but this ignores the fact that users register a site’s design first and a good design influences the mood and attitude with which they then approach the content.

At a Microsoft conference a while back I attended a seminar on the concept of Positive Affect. This is the idea that attractive things appear to work better. In a small experiment two groups of people were asked to use a particularly nasty town council website. In one group a happy mood was induced. When asked to score their experience of the site, the happy group scored it significantly higher than the control group. There’s more detail in the presentation (PDF) from slide 77 (Warning: large download).

Design also influences your credibility. If your site looks like your nephew’s year 3 art project then don’t expect anyone to take it seriously (unless perhaps you’re marketing to primary schools) and expect to lose lots of users before they even read your content.

Content
Assuming you’ve got through the design gate, then your content comes into play. Remember that we’re still in the first few seconds of user interaction, so the layout and structure of your content will be as important as what it actually says.

Users scan web pages so your content needs to be structured to help draw the eye to what you want to talk about. What you’re actually trying to do is encourage users to fixate on a piece of your content so that they start reading instead of scanning. Keep paragraphs short and use sub-headings, bulleted and numbered lists, emboldened words, and writing techniques like showing numbers as numerals.

In the Engagement phase, the bit of text content users are most likely to read is your h1 page heading and this is a moment when SEO and UX are perfectly in tune. For good SEO your h1 text needs to reflect and support your page title which works brilliantly for UX, because the title is the link that users have clicked on to get to you. Their expectations are therefore set by the content of that link and if the first piece of text they read on arrival supports and reflects the link they clicked, then they’re more likely to engage with the site.

Only when you’ve engaged your users can your site start to work on converting them to a customer or a reader. How

UX affects this stage will be the subject of next week’s post.

This article was written by Rupert Hughes – managing consultant at Firehorse Digital.

Any usability professional will tell you that designing and building websites in isolation of its target users could well be seriously limiting its effectiveness.

The effect of poor usability or information architecture (IA) can be seen in a number ways such as high bounce rates, poor conversion rates (aka persuasiveness), reduced ROI or simply poor brand presence.

Of course poor information architecture can also affect how your website is crawled and its search engine index inclusion efficiency.

The adoption of a structured approach to managing web projects – and the subsequent implementation of UCD – user centric design – is one step towards improving user experience. Anyone who has practiced Agile project management will tell you how users features rest on user input.

In light of the above, Emarketeers has launched a new training course: Usability & Information Architecture training.

It is aimed at anyone working on web projects who want to take a more structured approach to improving user-centricity from an information architecture and web design perspective: typically junior information architects, usability consultants, web designers, web producers or project managers.

The course is run by the fabulous Lynda Elliot who has years of usability and information architecture experience to bring to the day. Lynda will impart her theoretical and practical knowledge and promises to make it highly interactive and fun!