

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

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edmccaffrey
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.

~~~
timr
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.

~~~
edmccaffrey
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.

~~~
timr
_"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."_

I think you're exaggerating. The NYT designer's redesign is extremely similar
to the existing layout, with perhaps a bit more spacing and better colors. You
may not like it, but it's a stretch to call it a "disaster".

When I said you have a problem, I wasn't trying to imply that you're
irrational or confused. I just think you have an opinion that's rooted
intensely in the way that _you_ use the site (totally understandable), and
you're trying to generalize that opinion to everyone. For example, I've
_never_ used the events feature that you find so important, and before I saw
the NYT design I had no idea that you _could_ create an account. If I didn't
know it, maybe there are millions of other people who don't know about it
either -- a good reason why the feature might be under-utilized.

~~~
edmccaffrey
> For example, I've never used the events feature that you find so important,
> and before I saw the NYT design I had no idea that you could create an
> account. If I didn't know it, maybe there are millions of other people who
> don't know about it either -- a good reason why the feature might be under-
> utilized.

And that proves my point. The NY Times redesign dedicates lots of space to a
new feature that relies on a feature that no one uses. Craigslist is designed
specifically to be anonymous to the point where you don't require an account.
Putting something that personalizes an account goes against one of the things
that made them popular in the first place.

This reply shows that you are posting on the redesign without doing any
research. I don't use the events feature, but if you bothered to do any
research before commenting then you would see that it is quite popular.

The most cursory research on what the posts are will tell you that most people
use the site to get/get rid of something (e.g., jobs, items, sex), or for the
community features.

A design that requires marginalizes one of these things to the least visible
location is a disaster.

~~~
timr
_"This reply shows that you are posting on the redesign without doing any
research. I don't use the events feature, but if you bothered to do any
research before commenting then you would see that it is quite popular."_

Why do you have to take such a hostile tone? I'm not attacking you. This isn't
an argument that can be won or lost.

That said, I still think you're exaggerating your case -- the redesign puts
the event calendar on _every_ page on the site, as opposed to the current
design, where it only appears on a few pages. It may not be as prominent as
you think it should be, but that's fairly subjective. Calling the design a
"disaster" is a stretch.

The bottom line is that neither one of us knows the practical implications of
the redesign, nor _could_ we, without doing usability testing. It's a matter
of opinion.

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

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

~~~
pwmanagerdied
It's Tim!

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seldo
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.

~~~
Gibbon
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...](http://www.lifeclever.com/khoi-vinh-mark-boulton-grids-are-good/)
which applies a grid layout to a Yahoo type homepage.

~~~
seldo
> 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?

~~~
Gibbon
Because your paying customers like newspapers but want the convenience of a
website?

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andrewescott
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.

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

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

------
Gibbon
"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.

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GavinB
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.

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lsb
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
4\. Automaticly fix all uppercase posts.

~~~
derefr
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.

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kul
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>

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amirkhella
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 :)

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btn
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.

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

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erlanger
[http://idsgn.org/images/redesigning-craigslist/craigslist-
st...](http://idsgn.org/images/redesigning-craigslist/craigslist-studio8.jpg)

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.

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firgurefaster
It's about time.

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

