Here is another interesting area to look at during software development lifecycle. Once a web application goes live it is not the end. In fact its life starts getting serious once it goes live. New feature releases, updates and maintenance are part of an application’s life cycle. Unless and otherwise it is a critical application every other application would go offline during sometime of the year. During that time you do not want the users to get a “Cannot find …” error. The standard is to post a static page that says “The site is down for maintenance. We will be back shortly”. Today I was stumbling upon few sites and got into Whisher, looks like they were down for maintenance. See below the screenshot of their message. Makes a difference isn’t it?

Error and exception handling is a part and parcel of any software development. One might be handling the errors and exceptions technically well and make it easy to troubleshoot but the user experience also matters. If something doesn’t work and the user is shown an error page obviously the first reaction would be a let down feeling. But if at all something can calm the end user a bit, it would be in a way the error message is displayed. I was trying to open a document from my Gmail in Google Docs and I got an error page (snapshot below). Though I was disappointed the document was not opening, the message caught my attention and made me smile.