Usability Analysis of website Craigslist Wenjuan Zou(Joerica)

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Abel McBride
5 years ago
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1 Usability Analysis of website Craigslist Wenjuan Zou(Joerica)

2 Introduction of Craigslist Craigslist is a classified advertisements website with sections devoted to jobs, housing, personals, for sale, items wanted, services, community, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums.

3 Heuristics for Web Page Usability Navigation should be clear and obvious It should be easy to find information Pages should be designed to promote flow Pages should be readable Interactive features should be visible and provide good feedback The design should limit or prevent user errors

4 Navigation should be clear and obvious When you open this website, you can easily to know where you are, where you can go and how can you get there.

5 Navigation should be clear and obvious As you can see. On the left side, you can use search bar to search information, event calendar to provide upcoming event schedules and some useful information about craigslist. On the middle side, you can know the location you chose is Boston and you can choose other areas. The navigation is visualized, such as you can choose housing block, jobs block, for sale block. On the right side, the navigation list can help users change to other location.

6 Navigation should be clear and obvious BUT for new users, it is hard to find navigation bar because usually the global navigation bar should be put together on the top or left side, not separate block by block.

7 It should be easy to find information When users move their mouse to each blue words, it will see a grey background color for that line. The category is clear and simple, like housing, jobs It is great that users can use search bar at the left side, because this site has a lot of information.

It should be easy to find information As you can see, except apt/ housing words are purple that I was clicking, you can see words craigslist, housing swap "and Boston are purple which different with

8 It should be easy to find information As you can see, except apt/ housing words are purple that I was clicking, you can see words craigslist, housing swap "and Boston are purple which different with other words. This design can help users relieve the burden of memory, users don t have to remember their browsing history. However, this design might expose browsing history to other people by using the same computer, unless clear computer s browsing history by purpose.

9 Pages should be designed to promote flow It is obvious that the interface separate by three parts, generally has five vertical lists of items. The background color for the middle three vertical lists are white, so users can understand those three column are major information for this page. It can direct the user s eye from top-left to bottom right, and create a sense of flow across the page.

strong, and too much repetition can become

10 Pages should be designed to promote flow Similarity of blue blocks in an image produce repetition. Repetition of same blue words can be very strong, and too much repetition can become boring, so the best repetition also has an amount of variation included. What s more, too much similarity can cause quick exhaustion on part of the viewer.

11 Pages should be readable The background color make blue text content placed on the top Arial is widely used font No capitalization words

12 Pages should be readable The blue color for text contents are too saturated and saturated color can tire the eye, especially for a web site has a lot of information. Only one color and one font for text content, it can not highlight important information

13 Interactive features should be visible and provide good feedback When users move mouse to each link, the text will turn to be purple to inform users this is a clickable link, this is appropriate feedback to let users know. Once clicked a hyperlink, it gives appropriate affordance. When I clicked community. You can see a underlined text is a link that is a correct affordances.

14 Interactive features should be visible and provide good feedback There is no visualized account creation button and ratings, editing tools. For new users want to create a account are Hard to find, they have to click in my account, then find small line on the bottom of the page.

15 The design should limit or prevent user errors For this principle, I have to say Craigslist did an amazing job for such a busy website. The browsing speed is very fast, it is hard to find an error. May no error is one of the reason why Craigslist has no images or animation on their page.

16 Add a trash bin bufon Improvements Add a global navigation bar at top Add a account create bufon

community, housing, jobs, personal and so on in the navigation bar.

17 Improvements 1. For common usage, it is helpful to add a global navigation bar at the top, put categories community, housing, jobs, personal and so on in the navigation bar. The default page will shows information about community. Users can switch other categories. By doing this, it can make the home page clearer and simple, also meet general people s browsing habits.

18 Improvements 2. For that awkward situation that is purple words might expose browsing history, I think it will be helpful add a trash bin button at the bottom right. When users clicked the button, users could delete browsing history.

Improvements 3. It will be helpful to use other color(eg: orange) highlight important information. 4. Any interactive functionality included in the site (e.g. account creation, ratings, editing tools, etc.

19 Improvements 3. It will be helpful to use other color(eg: orange) highlight important information. 4. Any interactive functionality included in the site (e.g. account creation, ratings, editing tools, etc.) should be clearly visible and provide feedback when used. So add these functions will be better for users experiences.

20 Thank you very much!

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