008: Where's the mountain?
I'm doing a Daily UI Design Challenge: designing a different screen each weekday for 100 days based on the prompt I receive in my email. Knowing very little about what sorts of prompts I'd receive, I decided to try my best to make all of my screens fit within a fictional travel-planning app, Let's Travel.I'm also writing about some of my UX considerations along the way.
I knew that sooner or later, something would pop up that really didn't make sense to be part of my Let's Travel app, and day eight's challenge was to design a 404 page. Since 404 errors result from a page not being found on a server (e.g., the page was moved and the URL was not updated), they don't really make sense for mobile apps.
I designed a 404 page for Let's Travel anyway:
I thought about tweaking the challenge so that it would fit within the Let's Travel app ecosystem: perhaps I could make a "no search results found" page, instead. However, when I sat down to start designing, I found myself playing on the metaphor of getting lost (very appropriate for a travel app), and well, that just didn't make sense for search results. So, I made a 404 page.
I spent a very long time deciding what the copy at the top of the page should say; the mountain image is the same one from the sign-in page; and I made a simple user-holding-a-map image to convey the sense of being lost. This probably isn't where the user wanted to end up, so I added a "Return Home" link at the bottom of the page to help her find her way back to where she wants to be. She can also use the app's back arrow, or the one on her phone. The page is cute, funny, and functional.
Unfortunately, no one will ever see it.
