After tweeting about using a page instead of a modal dialog, Chris Cheshire asked what should happen if the user presses back after deleting a customer’s account.

I had a look at the service I‘m working on at the moment and we show a 404 page.

This makes sense technically as the account no longer exists.

But I discussed with Duncan Brown how we could do this better.

And we came up with this custom 404 page:

# You cannot delete this customer’s account – it does not exist

It looks like you may have deleted it already.

[Continue to account list page]

This way the user knows why they cannot see the page and they can click the button to get back to a working page.