404 Page Optimization

UX Audit

The existing page offered a CTA to proceed to the homepage and leveraged a widely-recognized FOX character to deliver the message that the page the user was looking for was no longer available. While the design and copy packed a lot of personality, its tone could be perceived as shaming the user for arriving at an error through no fault of their own.

Competitive Research

To kickstart the project, I visited the websites of the other major television networks. With the exception of ABC, whose 404 page offered the same experience as FOX’s, I found that our competitors provided their users more detailed context as to why they have arrived on a 404 page. Some had also employed their 404 page to directly introduce available content to the user or to redirect to a general “watch” page.

Key takeaways

• FOX was missing an opportunity to demonstrate to the user that their viewership mattered by not offering more meaningful context
• Competitors had also identified and were already employing the 404 page as a means of content discovery
  

Wireframes

The optimization manager wanted to test the existing design (control) against two variants: one that presented the user with FOX’s top-performing shows and one that allowed the user to browse by genre. 

High-fidelity mocks

Once the wireframes were presented and approved by the optimization manager, I moved into creating high-fidelity designs of the variant options and worked with our copywriter to improve upon messaging.

Testing + Insights + Iteration

After 7 days of the experiment going live, it was found that the Featured Shows variant was outperforming the Genre variant by a large margin. We theorized that the excess of choice on the second variant was increasing the likelihood that the user would abandon the journey to a video start. In order to test the theory, we iterated on the Genre variant to follow the same design format as the Featured Shows variant.

Final Design

The experiment was run for another week using the new design and the results confirmed that providing the user a more curated options landscape had a significant positive impact on engagement. The Genre variant was now outperforming the Featured Shows variant. However, both the Genre and Featured Shows designs showed an increase in clicks that could not be ignored — 60% and 43% respectively.