Craigslist Redesign

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_craigslist_makeover

by rokhayakebe • 17 years ago

62 40 17 years ago

edmccaffrey3• 17 years ago

Those are all terrible, they are all making the ridiculously incorrect assumption that it is confusing. It's possibly the only site that my Luddite family can make full use of, without ever having asked me for help.

The designs that change the layout make it less usable by preventing you from seeing everything it has to offer on one spectacularly ugly, usable page.

The design that kept mostly everything the same but modernized the colors, fonts and spacing is still worse that the current site: the current site has an effect of the design dissappearing behind the content, and the redesign has the colors and highlights push past the links and draw my attention away.

timr3• 17 years ago

I disagree. A few were bad, but in my opinion the one by the New York Times designer was a usability improvement, while still keeping things simple. The layout was practically identical.

I think the problem you're experiencing is that craigslist is practically defined by its crappy design. Paradoxically, making craigslist better looking makes it less like craigslist. Every popular website experiences this kind of backlash when it is redesigned, because people get used to it the way it is, and don't want to re-learn what they already know.

edmccaffrey3• 17 years ago

I'm not experiencing any problem. The NY Times design is a disaster. It banishes the useful events feature to the most obscure part of the page, while giving tons of space to a feature that would only be used by the tiniest fraction of the users. Most users don't have an account and will not take advantage of that feature.

I'm not married to the bad design, and I don't think that a better design would inherently decrease usability; but these specific ones do, and the current design is usable. Uglyness doesn't necessarily mean poor usability.

pssdbt• 17 years ago

Wait, people actually use that events calendar on Craigslist? I've only seen people mistake it for personals and use it for advertising crap.

I agree that the New York Times designer's version is a big improvement. A few things that really bug me about the current version that are fixed with this design include the left aligned headers / fixed page flow, more obvious search box, and fixed colors. In my opinion if you're going to use default browser link colors you should be using the default browser background color. Maybe that just bothers me though, who knows, I'm weird. Also, why do we need to see a list of countries / states / anything besides local cities? How is that not just more useless clutter?

mattcottingham• 17 years ago

It's almost like complaining that Drudge Report is ugly. It is, but that's missing the point.

brandnewlow• 17 years ago

This is blogspam. The guy just lifted every photo and juicy quote from Wired and republished it on his blog.

chaosmachine• 17 years ago

True. Here's the original:

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_...

kyro2• 17 years ago

They do reference the Wired article. I really don't see anything wrong with it. It's a design blog, so it's understandable. If I were interested in design, that part of the article would be the most relevant to my interests, and so there'd be no need to go through the 3+ pages on Wired to get to it if someone has done the work for me (which seems to be appropriately cited).

unalone3• 17 years ago

They lift every part from the magazine, add nothing, and crop down from the original. There was no point to its reposting.

timdorr• 17 years ago

Even better, he violated Creative Commons and didn't attribute the header image to me: http://www.flickr.com/photos/timdorr/3726252344/

pwmanagerdied• 17 years ago

It's Tim!

lsb• 17 years ago

I agree with edmccaffrey: it's not confusing at all! Here's what I'd like from a redesign of Craigslist:

1. Automatic spelling correction from posting-lingo in Standard English.

2. Automatic stemming of arbitrary description of location into zipcode.

3. Avoid scams by something like reputation points.

The front-page navigation is not their killer feature.

clay• 17 years ago

4. Automaticly fix all uppercase posts.

derefr2• 17 years ago

You mean, automatically block all-uppercase posts. Let the people figure it out for themselves, don't let them think that "computers just do that" so that they start sending e-mails that way.

derefr2• 17 years ago

Having more property-based forms on data-heavy posts (e.g. when selling computers) would be nice. It's very frustrating when someone leaves off something in the plaintext description that would be a required field if it was separated.

erlanger2• 17 years ago

> 1. Automatic spelling correction from posting-lingo in Standard English.

> 2. Automatic stemming of arbitrary description of location into zipcode.

One hallmark of Craigslist is that they do not care one shred about what you post, as long as it doesn't violate the liberal terms of service. Drop by your local RnR if you think that all-caps is anywhere near the most egregious abuses of content freedom on the site.

> 3. Avoid scams by something like reputation points.

I'm confident that the majority of content on Craigslist is submitted by anonymous users.

firgurefaster• 17 years ago

It's about time.

andrewescott• 17 years ago

One thing that seems to have been missed is that the Craigslist design is part of their business model - it results in pages that are very small and keeps their bandwidth costs down, enabling them to offer free listings.

erlanger2• 17 years ago

http://idsgn.org/images/redesigning-craigslist/craigslist-st...

1. This approach likely pentuples bandwidth, and that's optimistic.

2. If you've never posted to Craigslist, don't try to redesign it. Anyone who's posted with an image knows that no such "product zoom" would be possible because of how CL transforms uploaded images to a suitably small file size.

Craigslist is a paragon of usable design, and you don't want someone who's critical of it for aesthetic reasons to be touching your website.

I got started in this industry as a web designer and I'm considering a move back. There are so many clowns who don't know a thing about usability and think that too much whitespace plus an anorexic serif equals quality.

btn• 17 years ago

No matter how the site is re-designed, people will hate it. This is simply because people hate change.

The NYT team (for example) could test their deign and produce empirical evidence that their design (with tweaks from testing, of course) is better, faster, and generally more usable in every task for every kind of user---and long-term Craigslist users will still hate it, claim it's unusable, unintuitive, and is confusing.

seldo2• 17 years ago

This article confirms a number of things to me, all of which I already believed: 1. pure designers are not good at useful web apps (Studio8), 2. the NYTimes people couldn't design their way out of a paper bag 3. the BarackObama.com guy is a freaking genius of usability

Some people here love the NYTimes version but I really think it devotes a ton of space to features nobody really uses in an effort to force people to use them more -- something the NYTimes itself does. Of course, I hate the design of NYTimes.com itself, so maybe I'm biased.

SimpleScott's design simply reinforces existing usage patterns, and for that reason I like it best.

unalone3• 17 years ago

SimpleScott's was terrific. I love the guy's website: http://www.simplescott.com/

Gibbon3• 17 years ago

The NYTimes example is by Khoi Vinh (http://www.subtraction.com/). He's certainly no design slouch, particularly when it comes to grid based layouts.

NYTimes is an enormously complex site. Given the ridiculous number of priorities they have to juggle, and number of people they have to please, I think they do an admirable job. The site has to balance looking like a historic newspaper with the constraints of the web.

I particularly like Vinh and Boulton's presentation "Grids are Good" http://www.lifeclever.com/khoi-vinh-mark-boulton-grids-are-g... which applies a grid layout to a Yahoo type homepage.

seldo2• 17 years ago

> The site has to balance looking like a historic newspaper with the constraints of the web.

See, that's certainly what they're trying to do, but I have absolutely no idea why they think "look like a newspaper" is one of their key constraints. You're a website: look like a website. The reason people don't read newspapers anymore is because they're inconvenient, why on earth would try to emulate a dying format?

TrevorJ• 17 years ago

The phone book isn't pretty either, but that's not what it is made for. The current site is functional and straightforward.

jonknee• 17 years ago

Not a great example as fewer people are using the phone book every year in favor of sites like YellowPages.com that look a lot more like what the "after" designs in this article were.

ryanwaggoner• 17 years ago

None of those people are using YellowPages.com over the physical phone book because the aesthetics are better.

mbrubeck• 17 years ago

I can only speak for people I know, but as far as I can tell the phone book is being replaced by (a) cell phones, which until the iPhone mostly had horrible UI design and (b) Google, which goes barely beyond Craigslist in the visual design department. I don't know anyone who uses YellowPages.com. (According to Alexa its reach is 0.1%.)

GavinB• 17 years ago

The problem with craigslist isn't the graphic design. It's functional and clear.

The problem is that useful data isn't required and available. For instance, partment listings should require at least cross streets, so that it's possible to search geographically. Computer parts should be split into component (laptop, monitor, cpu, keyboard, etc).

Craigslist is based around location, so every listing should have at least some rough neighborhood geolocation.

A little customization by category would render the site much more usable, while changing nothing that would be confusing to users.

Gibbon3• 17 years ago

"Don't make something unless it's both necessary and useful; But if it's both necessary and useful, don't hesitate to make it beautiful." - Shaker Dictum.

It's entirely possible that Craigslist is successful on account of its ugliness. It's also entirely possible that it's successful in spite of its ugliness. I'm inclined to believe the latter.

Aesthetics are extremely important. One can certainly succeed without beautiful design, but more beautiful products are perceived to be more useable.

On the one hand, the right designer could significantly improve the look and feel of Craigslist, without affecting it's structure: a carefully applied colour scheme, better typography, whitespace and a fine attention to detail would help.

On the other hand, Craigslist is the mother of all outliers. Everything they do seems totally counter-intuitive.

Is there room for improvement? Definitely. Should it be improved? It's worthy of a debate.

killerrabbit• 17 years ago

Half of me loves the idea of a redesign, while the other half hates it.

tzury• 17 years ago

they should have run this attempt with HN as well ;-)

kul• 17 years ago

Craigslist works.

People who complain about it being a crappily designed site are missing the point. It gets information to people who need it.

See http://blog.topix.com/archives/000095.html

amirkhella• 17 years ago

I like one or two designs, but I can't say that any of them is "better". It's easy for designers to pop Photoshop open and start moving things around to provide a final "web 2.0" layout or a "more beautiful" look and feel, without looking at analytics and studying user behavior. CraigsList is useful, but not very usable. And sometimes a useful product with low usability score is better than a usable product, that 50M existing users need to re-learn. Muscle memory plays an important role for existing customers, especially frequent visitors.

Craigslist is a profitable business. And they need to evolve incrementally the same way Amazon does.

The fact that it's simple and basic doesn't mean that it's broken. It works. At least 95% of the time :)

Craigslist Redesign

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