According to the principles of gamification, users always want to feel like they’re making progress.^[[1]] A 404 error page impedes that sense of progress, especially since more often than not, 404 pages give them little to no information and send them back to where they came from.

You can make 404 error pages useful by:

• Designing a customized error page for your product that is in line with the rest of your pages and elements in terms of design, color, brand voice, and tone.
• Using a simple, apologetic tone to explain that the page could not be found and why. You can do this by going through your log files to find the most commonly mistyped URLs and offering them as a hyperlinked list below the apologetic error message. Or, you could perform a spell check and show any relevant pages that do exist.
• Providing a search box so that users can find what they were looking for in the first place without having to get the exact URL right.^[[2]]