Sorry for the sensational title – I had an IA class assignment to critique the homepage of a website I find useful and this title looked great on my opening powerpoint slide. After receiving the assignment I decided I would search for a site to critique while doing my daily laps of the internet. I found a lot of junk but most of it was too boring to criticize. Coincidentally a recent violent hailstorm in Austin piqued me to go look in classifieds for deals on nice cars with hail damage. I pulled up Craiglist and my UX disaster klaxon went off! Paydirt
We all know that Craigslist is one of the great class acts on the internet. They helped me sell my dusty treadmill for 40% of retail and scored me a dedicated beer fridge for $40, delivered. Very efficient. Besides that they’ve also stuck to their original plan and avoided the temptation of overt or even reasonable monetization. They’ve kept their old-school internet design intact, wrangled 2.6% of the traffic on the internet and helped millions of people and things find each other – all while slowly destroying the newspaper industry’s classified revenue models.
I stayed focused on the front page because that was the assignment but I think it is a useful constraint. Trying to over-grok the Craigslist site in any kind of depth would be an endless exploration. The other thing I avoided was looking for someone else’s evaluations or design criticism to maintain a clean critical palette.
Basically their front page is a disaster for information architecture and usability. They expose the site’s classifieds taxonomy onto one browsable section of 174 10px blue links. Every major category is exploded into subcategories regardless of what you are scanning for. The links are tiny and close together. The entire right column of the site is dedicated to in depth navigation between alternate cities and countries – which I imagine at least the countries section would be rarely used.
You could argue that this layout provides some thin opportunity for serendipity; you may be cruising for some antique bicycle pedals then notice that they have a forum for divorcees or decide to see what treadmills cost in Kenya and Et Voilà: off you go on a new adventure. I’d argue that they could reclaim some of that space for featured listings picked by an editorial staff member and this would be a much more effective way to make serendipitous discoveries. I know it is cool to keep this format intact to honor a traditional aesthetic but I think there is a genuine opportunity cost for the user as a result of too much real estate consumed by information about granular areas of the massive site.
I suppose one could point to research that says that users would make the least clicks to navigate in this scenario but I think the volume of information exposed offsets any reluctance of the user to navigate away from the home page. This consideration can be mitigated with ajax or some simple dynamic hiding of subcategories.
If you think about Craiglist as a place where seekers try to find specific or even somewhat specific information then this scheme is very difficult to use. Small fonts, visual redundancy, lack of white space and indistinct headings. Aside from the easy to use search box on the left the basic nav is nearly unusable. It is even more difficult to use on mobile devices. Visually impaired people using screen readers will have to navigate a sea of text to narrow down their search. I downloaded the homepage and did a little bit of organization to demonstrate how the site could be much better.
- Show them the top level caregories for classifieds only. Hidden divs expand expose subnav when the user clicks the header. Enlarge the font and make big clickable areas.
- As the div expands we reveal a handy search interface. They can use the search box to search across subcategories of the selected top level category in case the user doesn’t find an obvious subcategory after scanning the list. Repeats the useful searchbox on the left but I don’t think it is overkill.
Click the image to see working model
- Collapse the geography divs. Make expandable divs that can be popped open on demand.
- Use regained geo real estate on the right side to display editorial or user rated content or at least run advertisements for non profits. I respect their aesthetic dedication and think they have evolved social ethics but I do think the opportunity cost of sticking with thier existing home page outweighs any sentimentality about the layout.
- Use ajax to summon subcategories. Speed up page load times. Degrade gracefully based on user agent.
Checkout my approximate working model by clicking on the image. I’m no designer so forgive the details.
Q: What percentage of users enter craigslist through front page? Hypotheses: 50%+, need to look it up
~sberry