CP26 · design prototypes

Recovering a website that stopped working

Two independent proposals answering the same brief, produced under the same conditions and presented here for review side by side.

A hosting customer reports that their website stopped working after a recent change. They want to get it working again.

The brief deliberately named no solution — not backups, not restoration. Working out what the customer actually needs, and who has to act, was part of the task.

Neither of these is the real product. Both are design prototypes of a hosting control panel. Every site, person, organisation, server and backup in them is fictional. No page is connected to any real system, and nothing here performs a hosting operation of any kind.

Draft 1

Makes the environment's "not serving" status actionable, walks a guided request, and covers what happens when there is nothing good to restore from.

Draft 2

A guided intake that captures what changed and which copy to try, handing off to a single operator screen that gathers the request, the backups and the next actions.

Reviewing these
Start as the customer whose site just stopped working, follow the work to whoever has to act on it, then come back to the customer's view. The proposals differ most in what they do when something cannot proceed — try the paths that should fail, not only the ones meant to succeed.
How each was produced
Deliberately not stated here, so the drafts can be judged on what they are. The two were produced by the same model under identical conditions; exactly one thing differed between them.
A note on the review panels
Both drafts annotate their own screens, marking what they treat as existing product behaviour against what they are proposing. Those annotations are the authors' claims, not verified facts — the two drafts disagree with each other in places, and one disagrees with itself.
Other experiments
All prototypes on this site