Page not found (404) and Service unavailable (5xx) pages

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This is a place for digital teams in the NHS to work together and develop the NHS digital service manual.

https://service-manual.nhs.uk/community-and-contribution

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Page not found (404) and Service unavailable (5xx) pages #233

Open chrimesdev opened 4 years ago

chrimesdev commented 4 years ago

What

Patterns for Page not found (also known as a 404) and Service unavailable (also known as as 500 or 503) pages.

Why

All websites and services should display a user friendly 404 or 500 status page, opposed to the default pages from whichever technology stack in use. The default pages are usually quite technical and not very user friendly.

On services that have a custom 404 or 500 status page, there is an inconsistency in design and content.

Examples from GOV.UK Design System

Page not found pages - GOV.UK Design System There is a problem with the service pages - GOV.UK Design System

Examples of existing NHS pages

NHS website

NHSX website

NHS digital service manual

NHS 111 Online

NHS Digital

National Data Opt Out

Slack messages

GrilloPress commented 4 years ago

NDOP pages

Service unavailable

Generic error

Page not found (404)

Forbidden [Due to being outside the UK or trying to navigate directly to assets] (403)

sarawilcox commented 4 years ago

Interestingly some of these use "please" and "sorry". Something to consider (and check in user research) - our forms guidance says:

Use words like "please" and "sorry" sparingly in forms

You do not need to say "please" when you ask someone to do something in a form or "sorry" whenever the user makes a mistake or cannot complete the task. An example of when we do say "sorry" is if something very inconvenient has happened and it's our fault.

"Please" suggests people have a choice. It can sound patronising, and "sorry" can sound false. They're not usually necessary and they lose their impact when you overuse them. Instead, show users that we care by softening your language and using helpful, clear, meaningful content.

GrilloPress commented 4 years ago

For NDOP we only use sorry for these pages. This is because it's highly likely we've failed or it is a massive mess up somewhere or in the case of geo-restriction a massive annoyance. We do not use sorry anywhere else.

We only use please when asking users to try again later.

tomdoughty commented 3 years ago

On NHS UK 404 or 500s are handled by Akamai. All we have to do is make the app throw and error and that correct page is shown to users.

The code for these pages lived just in storage rather than a set repository until a month ago… The pages are now built from this repository https://github.com/nhsuk/nhsuk.error-pages

tblacker7 commented 3 years ago

Screenshot 2021-02-22 at 11 30 23 On the WordPress Nightingale implementation we took the active decision to include

a search form
return to home page button
and sitemap style list of content in the aim to provide the user with a route to successful resolution rather than a generic 'this content isnt here' style message. The other reason for this was to ensure we don't also have dead ends for search robots, but instead have a route back in to the relevant content.

The layout is determined in the https://github.com/NHSLeadership/nightingale-2-0/blob/develop/404.php file, and can be over-written in child themes. Pages generated by 500 series codes are not handled inside the theme, but instead by the server (in our own implementation we have CloudFlare generated pages which appear similar to the NHS Website 404 view above, but also including the CloudFlare Ray ID)