Craigslist Redeisgn

Redesigning Craigslist to appeal to the modern audience via reducing clutter and streamlining navigation

Date: November 2024

Duration: 4 weeks

Team: 4 designers

My Role: Product Designer

Tools: Figma


The Problem

Craigslist was launched in 1995, yet its user interface has remained largely unchanged. Because the platform emphasizes simplicity in its UI choices, it often results in a cluttered experience that can be challenging to navigate and lacks intuitiveness. During my search for furniture while moving to a new apartment, I found the UI visually overwhelming and struggled to locate the items I needed amidst the dense and disorganized text.

Craigslist is too cluttered and too difficult to navigate


The Solution

How might we redesign Craigslist to be more intuitive and user-friendly while appealing to the modern audience?

We wanted to focus on appealing to the modern audience with more intuitive features. However, we didn’t want to lose the feeling of Craigslist’s ease of use and simplicity.

Competitive Analysis

  • minimalistic but trendy in design

  • Robust search filters (brand, size, price, etc)

Lo-Fi Sketches

Mid-Fi Prototype

Current Craigslist

  • search for location through cluttered exhaustive list

  • cluttered list of ALL categories and ALL of their subcategories

  • too much blue text, hard on the eyes

  • cluttered filters on left

  • pictures are not uniform in size

  • item title is small and cramped

  • no obvious call to action button for purchasing

High-Fi

Positive Comments about our Redesign

  • “Looks trustworthy and organized compared to craigslist. More aesthetically pleasing

  • Aesthetically pleasing, layout is nice and easy to navigate.

  • “It is very easy to navigate. It looks very nice and simple.”

  • “I like the fonts, the sizing, the categories, the little message bar, how simple it is, the way the images are presented”

Main Feedback


Other Website Stores Thrived From Good Organization

Depop

Facebook marketplace


User Flow Diagram

  • Easy-to-use search and category browsing

  • Localized lists

Fleshing Out “For Sale” Section


Implementing More Visuals


Major Improvements In Decluttering

User Testing

Redesigned Prototype

  • simple search bar to type in location

  • main categories now, subcategories later (moved to filters)

  • big photos and easy-to-read text

  • simple and easy filters on left (including subcategories)

  • pictures uniform

  • title is upfront and clear

  • clear “message to buy” feature


Final Product

Design System


93% of Users Preferred our Design over Craigslist

After creating our high-fidelity prototype, we enlisted of 14 friends and peers to interact with our website and offer feedback about the redesign.

Negative Comments about our Redesign

  • “Some of the buttons aren’t aligned with the text, and the ‘star’ button is a little hard to see for the user”

  • “the navigation bar at the top thats like craigslist/sacramento/for sale. I personally don't like the way it looks.”

  • “simple design maybe can be more aesthetic

  • “It might be too simple.”


See It Yourself!

  • “The whole website overall feels so much more modern and is just easier to navigate.”

  • “Easy to find location with the search bar, more visuals help navigation, reasonable sized pictures for listings”

Figma File


User Research

My team and I distributed a Google Form to both our friends and family to gather insights on Craigslist’s pain points and pleasure points. We received responses from 45 individuals, with approximately two-thirds having never used Craigslist and one-third being previous users.

  • 9 responders specifically pointed out that they liked the simplicity of Craigslist’s current design

  • 14 responders reported that Craigslist was “too text heavy” or “hard on the eyes”


Users enjoyed Craigslist’s simplicity, but disliked it’s clutter and organization

  • Majority of users reported using Craigslist mainly for browsing and buying items

Goals

  • Most responders that never used Craigslist before found it difficult to navigate the website due to being disorganized

  • increase ease of use/beginner accessibility

  • maintain the simplicity of Craigslist while reducing the clutter

  • focus on improving “For Sale” section of Craigslist

Accomplishments

My team and I were extremely proud to learn more about prototyping and interactions. We leaned heavily towards learning how to make different interactions in Figma, and I believe we were able to showcase the knowledge we gained. This design sprint was extremely fun and rewarding, thanks to the Design Interactive club at Davis and thanks to the fellow passionate designers I met on the way.

Reflection

Journey in Review

  • Fleshing out other categories: Our design sprint was fast-paced, which limited our ability to fully flesh out our website. We would have loved to explore the other Craigslist categories and redesign those pages to create a fully functional website. Especially due to the unique nature of each category, the varying intentions of users in each, and the distinct challenges they may present to us.

  • Implementing User Feedback: We were unfortunately unable to implement all of the user feedback due to time constraints, however we would have loved to improve our high-fidelity designs from the insights we gained through user testing. For example, we would like to polish up the organization, give the website more content and personality so it isn’t too simple or boring, and we would have liked to redesign the navigation bar.

  • Time Management: At the end of the project, we realized there was still a lot of testing and iterating we would have liked to do before presentation day. However, our lack of time management and our lack to plan how long each step would take caused us to sacrifice making important changes to our website after the high-fidelity prototypes. Now understanding how much testing and iterating happens throughout the entire design process, I will strive to allocate enough time to achieve all the goals I set for myself.

What I would do better next time


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