Redesign Craigslist (3): What’s Wrong With Craigslist?

The weaknesses of Craigslist, accounting to Smashing magazine:

1. The Design is Bland and Outdated
As mentioned earlier, and as any Craigslist visitor already knows, the design of the website lacks visual appeal.

2. Logging In, Signing Up, and Managing an Account is More Difficult than Necessary
Craigslist has achieved its success due to the huge community of users it has managed to build. According to its fact sheet, each month over 30 million new classifieds are posted to the website, and over 12 billion pages are viewed. With this kind of activity level, it’s clear that making the process of creating an account, logging in and managing the account should be as straightforward as possible. However, the current website could be improved in these areas. Unnecessary clicks are needed to do anything with an account, and options on the account page are very limited.

3. Screen Space Is Not Prioritized
One issue with the current design of the Craigslist home page, as well as sub-pages, is the use of screen space. Valuable screen space could be used more effectively in some areas to improve the usability of the website.

4. Navigation
Craigslist is really a network of smaller websites held on sub-domains of Craigslist.org. Each sub-domain, representing an actual location, has its own board of classifieds. Currently, over 550 cities in 50 different countries are represented. With any website of this size and this amount of content, challenges with the navigation will always exist. Some aspects of navigation are rather effective on Craigslist, but others leave room for improvement.

For starters, there is no navigation menu that appears consistently throughout the website. Some pages use a left sidebar, some don’t. Some pages are easily accessible from most areas of the website, but not all. On many of the secondary pages, huge amounts of screen space are left completely empty with very few navigational options. This forces users to hit the “Back” button in their browser to go to another section of the website, something that could be improved by adding more navigational choices on these pages.

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