Nettle: One User's Experience

Page 404, Where Are You

Ever accidentally type the wrong URL into Google? Maybe not, given the way the site's designed (rarely would you type something beyond "google.com" into your browser, and I suspect many just have Google as their default homepage, or use the embedded Google Search within many browsers to access the site). But if you do find yourself typing in an actual Google URL, and you make a mistake, you get a "404 not found" page that's right out of 1998:

Go ahead, try this and see: http://www.google.com/asdfghjkl

First there's the old logo. But more importantly, there's no link or facility to go anywhere else on the site -- instead of losing the user altogether. Two possibilities:

a. They know about this, and don't care, because the amount of traffic hitting the page is microscopically small.

b. They don't know about this, and might or might not care if they did know.

Compare and contrast to Yahoo's 404 page:

A clear message with an explanation, plus, let's see . . . one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, make it nine links, as well as a search box with search button.

Microsoft's 404 page is practically a site map. The New York Times' site has a decent 404 page. Meetup and CNET have decent 404 pages. So does Apple: they'll even try to sell you stuff. As does Amazon. eBay has had to have a decent 404 page for years because auction items eventually go away, as do their URLs. It's surprising to me they don't monetize the page better, and make it more inviting like their home page.

It always bugged me that at height of the hype for Howard Dean, his sites, including Blog For America, had lame 404 pages. Compare and contrast George Bush's site, which from the very beginning has had a densely-packed 404 page. As has, not surprisiingly, the RNC's 404 page.

Google's 404 page ought to at the very least be a lot closer to Google's homepage. Simple problem, simple fix. Wonder if they'll ever get around to it.

Meetup's New, Unclickable Homepage

Meetup recently launched their new 3.0 release, with many changes across the entire site. One set of changes I noticed right away: the home page, as depicted above.

Things I Didn't Expect To Find on Meetup's New Home Page:

• The Meetup Logo isn't clickable. Name a web company whose logo isn't clickable. They're supposed to be. They ought to take you somewhere.

• The call to action to join Meetup isn't clickable. "Join over a million people who:" it says. Click it. You can't join.

• Four pictures and their captions, none of which are clickable. Four calls to action: "Learn something", "Do something", "Change something", "Share something". Verbs. Imperative verbs. On the homepage. But not clickable. Hmm.

• Four diagonal lines of text lead the eye right to the "Find a Group" button. Very nice. Too bad none of the four lines is clickable... :-)

Don't get me wrong, I love Meetup. But I think this homepage does the company a great disservice. The message from this page design seems to be, "WE WANT YOU TO TYPE IN SOMETHING AND FIND A GROUP, OK? IN FACT WE'RE GONNA MAKE IT REALLY HARD TO DO ANYTHING ELSE FROM THIS PAGE." What happens if you don't want to find a group? What happens if you have no idea what Meetup is, and want to browse the site? Well, they do have a "Browse all interests" link, in a small font.

I would love to know what some usability / discoverability tests would reveal about this new page. Particularly from brand-new users who've never heard of Meetup before, or who just heard about it perhaps through the media reports or from a family member or friend. Are they going to be successful learning about Meetup from this home page?

I talk about Meetup all the time. I bring it up in conversations and almost every time, the person I'm speaking with hasn't heard of it. Even people in the technology industry. So I tell them to go check it out. Will they be successful? I don't know.