Recommendation List: Changes I Would Make to Craigslist. Five years ago I moved to Boston to go to graduate school. For months before my

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Herbert Allen
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1 Will Oakley Information Architecture and Design I Dr. Turnbull Oct. 12, 2006 Recommendation List: Changes I Would Make to Craigslist Five years ago I moved to Boston to go to graduate school. For months before my move, I heard stories of the horror that was the Boston Metro Area housing market; tales of how any good apartment is snagged within days of hitting the market, how if you want an apartment for September, you had better find it by June. I flew up to the city several months in advance and I managed to find a decent place with the help of a real estate agent, who was rewarded for his assistance with a fee equivalent to a month s rent. But I figured that all of the effort and money was well worth it. My opinion changed within days of classes starting. Over and over I heard classmates tell stories of arriving to town a week before the first of September and finding great apartments with ease, free of any agent fees. When I asked them how they had achieved such a realty feat, each one uttered a phrase that has now become familiar to thousands. Oh, I found it on craigslist. On a page titled what we re about, craigslist details their goals for their site as: giving each other a break, getting the word out about everyday, real-world stuff. restoring the human voice to the Internet, in a humane, non-commercial environment. keeping things simple, common-sense, down-to-earth, honest, very real. providing an alternative to impersonal, big-media sites. being inclusive, giving a voice to the disenfranchised, democratizing... 1

2 being a collection of communities with similar spirit, not a single monolithic entity. (Craigslist, 2006) By and large, the site has been successful in achieving these goals, as evidenced by the tremendous success it has been met with since its creation in 1995 (Craigslist, 2006). Craigslist now serves over 300 different regions in all fifty states and in over fifty countries and is the seventh most visited English language website (Craigslist, 2006). However, no business venture can rest on its laurels and hope to survive, and craigslist is no exception to this rule. In many ways, craigslist s success has had a negative impact on the homepage. For instance, each craigslist homepage features navigation to the craigslists for other regions on the left hand side of the page. When craigslist served only a handful of areas, this provided users with an easy way to navigate to the regional page that was most relevant to them with ease. However, with the huge boom in the markets craigslist serves, this helpful section has transformed into a mass of dozens of links, occupying approximately a third of the homepage s screen real estate. The sheer number of links in this section creates what Krug calls visual noise (2000, p ). This seems especially true when you consider how most users will never use most of the links and how the website remembers which particular city the user was last looking at. This means that after the user finds the city of most interest to him or her, they will likely no longer need that navigation section. So I decided to get rid of it (See #1). I give users access to the other region pages by placing a link labeled Choose another region beside the current city/region (see #2). It s a slight increase in inconvenience to the user, but since it is likely a link they will use 2

3 only once, I think this inconvenience is worth the increase in homepage real estate and the decrease in visual noise. I utilized the gained space to include some advanced navigation forms that I thought might be of interest to craigslist users (see #3). First, craigslist offers the ability to create accounts for users who post often to their sites. I thought that they could also offer users who visit the site often to look at posts the option of creating an account. A benefit of doing this would be gaining the ability to create a custom list that displays the last five posts that contain a search term specified by the user. This would save users time by allowing them a way to get to information they will likely want without having to work their way through the site s hierarchy or taking the time to use the site s search feature. The second addition is a form of social navigation, giving users the five most popular search terms used on that particular region s site. This will give users quick access to popular content, which is more likely to be of interest of them as well. These two new features will help the homepage better fulfill several needs that Krug believes a homepage should satisfy, including providing readers teases of content, timely content, short-cuts, and showing the user what they are looking for, something the current navigation heavy page does not achieve well (2000, p ). On the subject of navigation, I deleted a great deal of local navigation from the top area of the page. The original has tabs that refer to particular portions of the San Francisco Bay area. However, the abbreviated labels of these tabs are difficult to understand. I tried the tabs on the Boston site and was only able to identify one of the five from the tabs from sight. Labels creating confusion can lead to a loss of users and thus money, as Rosenfield and Morville point out (2002, p ). Rather than having users 3

4 attempt to figure out where they want to go by trial and error, or give up and leave in frustration, I deleted the tabs and inserted a link underneath the name of the city where the user can choose to narrow their search to a particular neighborhood (see #4). I also deleted the small w beside the city name that took the user to the Wikipedia article on the city. I believe that if users wanted to see the Wikipedia article, they would go to the Wikipedia website, not craigslist. Likewise, I deleted several of the items in the navigation area on the left side of the screen (see #5). Some I deleted because, like the w at the top of the screen, they linked to outside content that I thought was frivolous and not of interest to the user, such as weather or tide. (There s weather.com for that.) Other links were deleted because they were repetitive, such as help, faq, abuse, legal link which links to the same page as the help link further down the column. Subscriptions was deleted simply because craigslist no longer offers the service. I also moved the search box from the left of the screen to the upper right. According to Nielsen and Tahir, 35% of websites place the search here, rather than %30 percent who place it in the upper left (2002, p. 41). I believe that since most web browsers currently have a search feature on the left hand side of their browser bar the placing of the search in the upper left is much more likely to become a web convention. I also followed Nielsen and Tahir s advice of not labeling the search box, but using the search button to accomplish that purpose (2002, p. 20). I also changed the button to the same shade of blue as the rest of the page s unused links to continue the motif and to indicate to users that the button was clickable. 4

5 Finally, both Nielsen and Tahir and Krug emphasized the importance of a strong logo and tagline (Nielsen & Tahir, 2002, p. 10; Krug, 2000, p ). To me, the logo for craigslist was difficult to discern from the rest of the links on the page. I considered making a more intricate, image based logo for the site. But I thought about the site s mission of simplicity, the benefit of quick downloading that having no images offers, and the easy accessibility the current design offers. I decided I would keep the overall logo, which I think embodies the stripped down design scheme of the site, a design which keeps it free of distractions and makes it so easy to use. I did, however, what to modify the logo in such a way so that it looked like a logo. I accomplished this by increasing the logo s size and by adding the tagline I found it on before it (see #7). That phrase still captures the magic of craigslist as well today as it did the first time I heard someone utter it. It summarizes for a new user in only a handful of words what makes the site so wonderful. 5

6 References Craigslist. (n.d.). Retrieved October 11, 2006, from Krug, S. (2000). Don t make me think! A common sense approach to Web usability. Indianapolis: New Riders. Nielsen, J. & Tahir, M. (2002). Homepage usability: 50 websites deconstructed. Indianapolis: New Riders. Rosenfeld, L. & Morville, P. (2002). Information architecture for the World Wide Web. 2nd ed. Sebastopol: O Reilly. 6

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