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.