How To Make An “Undergoing Maintenance” Page Better
May 15th, 2008. Published under General. No Comments.
[digg=http://digg.com/programming/How_To_Make_An_Undergoing_Maintenance_Page_Better] shall get into this quickly. The reason I am writing this is because Twitter is down again! Now I have to write lots of text!
More to the point what really got me writing this post specifically was the boring “Ooops we have a problem” type page! This got me thinking. What are the best was to make use of, or make an “undergoing maintenance” or “experiencing technical difficulties” pages better? The main problem with the Twitter error page is that it is just a plain image that doesn’t give any useful information at all. Well I made a big list of 2 possible improvements:
1. Useful information. Now I will use Litturl as an example of getting something useful out of a 404/error page. What I did was list some links that they might like to use and suggest ways they. Pluse some actual information into why they have landed at that page. I also find a bit of humour helps calm the user down if they find them selves at that page.
2. Put some fun into it! If it is an error page or a “experiencing technical difficaulties” we already know there is no point in giving the user ways to interact with the system as the chances are they will end up at the same page again. So why not do what AdBrite do when they are doing an upgrade…
Let the user play Pacman! Simple!
I think it acheives an important goal, it shows the user that they actually care about them and put thought into selecting a game they could use til the upgrade is complete.
I hope that some big companies take this onboard, especially applications that seem to go down quite often ;). Any opinions or other ideas I can add to the list?
Ollie