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If I designed the Microsoft error pages

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How many of you have ever come across a “Page not found” or some other page error at one time or another on a website? How about on the Microsoft websites? What do they look like? Don’t you just love the ones that are filled with all sorts of weird characters, numbers, and letters and the words, “Error code:” in front of them? Or even just a plain 404 page? 

I ran across this last night while looking up some stuff on the internet and it drove me nuts. It’s bad enough you can’t find what you’re looking for but then you get this page that doesn’t help at all or makes no sense. Now, there are some out there that at least make you smile when you get them, which I actually appreciate. After all, errors happen, links break, pages sometimes mis-load. It’s a fact of life. So why not have some fun with it? As such, I thought I’d take a stab at what I’d put up for an error page at Microsoft, if they were ever foolish or desperate enough to put me in charge of that. Here was my first attempt:

ClippyOopsMed - Click image for full size

Like I said, I know design is not my area but c’mon, who doesn’t love Clippy after all? Fortunately there are a lot of people out there with much better design skills than me. I would just like to see them make the moments that we experience those error pages that come up from time to time more fun and enjoyable as we press the “Back” button or the “Refresh” button. Kudos to those that do it already and hopefully we’ll see more of them in the future.

By the way, for all of you creative types out there reading my Blog, if you have some ideas that you think would make great Microsoft error pages, I’d love to see what you come up with! 

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Thank you and have a wonderful day,

Eric Ligman – Follow me on TWITTER clip_image001and RSS clip_image002
Global Partner Experience Lead
Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights

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Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 26, 2010
    hmm converting a bsod to a bitmap, hows that for an error page!

  • Anonymous
    March 26, 2010
    I agree wholeheartedly, Eric!  After all, we know these are machines, but we also know that it's humans using them.  And I love your design attempt! (Ok, some people might think that's an ad and not an error message, and so many users already don't read their error messages as it is...)  Thanks for posting it!