Craigslist is a website whose focus is user-submitted ads; people can post ads for services, jobs, etc. and in turn, can also respond to other people's ads. One of the most talked about characteristics of Craigslist is how “simplistic” the layout and design is; on the homepage in particular, there is a lot of white space and cluttered text for all the different categories. What we wanted to focus on in our redesign of Craigslist is usability rather than design; can we make Craigslist more usable and efficient for both new users and returning users to the site while maintaining minimal changes to the website? For the essence of time, we focused on the two most important pages of Craigslist to redesign: the home page, and the listings page.
To do this, we performed some informal usability testing/discount evaluation of our own with five different people/users (according to Jakob Nielsen's rule of thumb, five people can identify 80% of usability problems, so we figured that would be a good number for our testing and for the purpose of this quick redesign of Craigslist). We prepared 4 tasks for our users to do in order to test the general usability of the site:
1. Please try to find job postings for work as an English teacher in Dalian, China.
2. Please search for any software internship in New York and Boston.
3. Please find all resumes that have been posted today.
4. Please find out how people think about which laptop is the best for college students.
2. Please search for any software internship in New York and Boston.
3. Please find all resumes that have been posted today.
4. Please find out how people think about which laptop is the best for college students.
All of the users that we tested with had some familiarity with Craigslist; they've been on the site a couple of times but nothing too extensive. We asked our users to perform these tasks and requested them to speak their thoughts out loud as they were performing the tasks. While they were performing the tasks, we took notes and observed their facial expressions and movements.
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Task 1:
Our users for the most part took an average of about 3-5 minutes to perform task 1; A large portion of the time was taken by users to figure out where exactly they could switch countries. While performing this, users were shown to hesitate a bit and looked confused.
Task 2 and 3:
These two tasks were generally accomplished very quickly; users had very little issue with these two tasks.
Task 4:
Users generally talked about how many subcategories there were and how annoying it was. Once the particular subcategory was found, users had no problem finding the information. However, there was one particular case where the user had actually skipped over the subcategory he was supposed to go to and ended up searching in another subcategory. This led to him taking a larger time than average to accomplish this task.
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After these tasks were done, we also took to Craigslist to experience it for ourselves more deeply. We freely explored the site for about an hour and noted some changes to the site that we would make ourselves to improve usability.
After the usability testing was finished with our users and with ourselves, we compiled a list of changes we wished to incorporate into our redesign. We then worked on our redesign for Craigslist by making wireframes for the main screens on Craigslist, which are the homepage and the listings page, and these are the results:
Homepage
In general for the homepage, we tried to strip down content because it seemed from our testing that there was too much content being displayed at once and this confused/distracted users. By providing major content only when the user wants to access that content, we believed that it would provide a much cleaner user experience with the site.
Major Change 1. There are less subcategories under each main category and imagery was added to each main category.
When we did our usability testing, one of the general themes of the feedback we got was that there was too much "clutter" on the homepage to digest all at once. So what we did was that we removed a lot of the subcategories from each of the main categories at first glance, and if the user wished to view more subcategories, they would hit view more and something along the lines of this would appear:
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By doing so, users are not distracted/confused by any other subsections from another category and overall, it looks much cleaner.
Major Change 2. Instead of listing all the various Craigslists on the homepage, users can use an autofill search bar to find what they're looking for instead.
This change was also inspired by our usability testing; since most of our users struggled for quite some time with switching countries on Craigslist we figured that it would just be easier if the user could just search up which particular Craigslist region they would like to go to and make it an autofill in case maybe the user doesn't know exactly how to spell certain areas. As the user types, they would see something like this:
Minor Change 1. The login section of Craigslist was redesigned (top right)
On the original homepage, there doesn't seem to be an actual login button; you would have to go to "My Account" to login but that may be confusing for users because "My Account" on other websites would imply that they have already logged in. We decided to designate a section in the top right of our redesign for logins so users can more easily log in. (See redesigned listings page for what it would look like when the user is already logged in).
Minor Change 2. Redundant links were coalesced into just one link.
On the original homepage, there were redundant links that led to the same page. Safety and avoid scams and fraud are two links that lead to the same page, for example. In our redesign, we got rid of these redundant links and simply made one link for each page because we thought it may be confusing to users to have multiple links that just lead to the same page anyways.
Listings Page
From our usability testing, we found that users did not seem to have any trouble using the listings page to accomplish the tasks that we asked them to do. We made a couple of changes still mostly inspired from our exploration.
Major Change 1. Favorites list is universally part of the UI.
On the original Craigslist, when you favorite a posting, an option then appears for you to view your favorites. But outside of that, if the user wanted to view their favorites, it would be very difficult for them. Instead, we have the favorites list as a part of the UI; when the user favorites a posting, they should get a message notifying them that they have favorite'd the post, and it should show up immediately in the favorites list like so:
Major Change 2. Repositioned listings criteria.
From our usability testing, one general behavior that we noted while users were doing task 2 was that their focus when the page first loads is on the listings near the center of the screen. Because their tasks involved using the listings criteria to find what they were supposed to look for, it took them a couple of seconds to realize that the criterias were off to the left of the listings. In our redesign, the listings criteria are repositioned to be in the same general area as the listings so that users can immediately know where to find them once the page loads. Because of the repositioning, it allows more room horizontally for the listings, so we added imagery, which would be clickable, next to pictures and photos.
Minor Change 1. Added a categories section with images that lead to the respective listings page for that category.
We decided to add this to the listings page as an alternative way to quickly access other listings pages via imagery for the other main categories rather than having to go back to the homepage or having to use the drop-down box to look for the page the user wants.
Afterword:
If we had more time/resources, it would have been interesting to hypothesize and run tests on the effect of lowercase/uppercase on Craigslist's usability since Craigslist's original design is all in lowercase (and is actually quite well-known for that feature) whereas our redesign uses upper-case (we believed that since this was typically the norm for most websites, it would offer some usability improvement for the website). We would probably run tests on 4 different designs: original Craigslist, original Craigslist w/ uppercase, redesigned Craigslist with lowercase, and redesigned Craigslist with uppercase, in order to see if one provides significant results over the others, or if none of them are really significant. If none were significant, we would recommend using purely lower-case as this is something users have learned to expect and recognize from Craigslist.
