Projects | Craigslist Redesign

project overview

Craigslist is an eCommerce site that has remained largely unchanged since its launch in 1996. For CGT 256 - Principles of UXD at Purdue University, my team and I were tasked to discover and design improvements for Craigslist. By conducting a trends review, competitor reviews, interface inventory, and hueristic evaluation, we were able to discover shortcomings of Craigslist and how to appeal to a younger audience.

The second part of this project was to conduct usability testing on Craigslist and discover if it's efficient, effective, and enjoyable for our target audience. Once this testing was completed, we analyzed results and compared it to our redesign.

The Goal
The goal of this project is to conduct an evaluation of Craigslist and redesign it utilizing visual design and usability principles to improve upon a dated style. The redesign needed to account for old features to not alienate their current user-group while also expanding into a younger audience. Once the first part was completed, we were tasked to test the real Craigslist for efficiency, effectiveness, and enjoyment and compare sentiments against our redesign.

discover & explore

Before ideating and coming up with a redesign, we needed to research the current market, trends, competitors, and analyze what features Craigslist has and how they function.

From the secondary research conducted, a few things could be easily taken into account from eBay for Craigslist. The UI definitely needs an upgrade from color to filter options. The site also needs to implement better customer service and shipping protection. The items on craigslist need to be categorized and sorted in a much way better way.

Ideate & Design

The purpose of a mood board is to represent the feel for the visual design direction. Their intent is to be an effective way to communicate big design ideas. To carry out our mood boards, three members of our team individually created mood boards for Craigslist redesign. These mood boards contain our proto-persona, representative images of our user group, the inspiration of design and layouts, and any graphic information. These moodboards can be found in our design documentation linked above.

After we presented our three moodboards, we created a style guide to direct our mockups. From our moodboards, we decided there were important features for our mockup to have.

A soft, not sterile design with rounded edges and light drop shadows
Relateable and simplistic typography with various weight styles for visual hierarchy
Added white space to the overall grid system
Reach out to seller page with the option to leave a review
Breakdown large navigation headings with sub-navigation
Making it casual and staying away from sterile, linear designs

prototype & test

To test our mockups, we conducted desirability testing. The testing conducted by our team included a Google Forms questionnaire. It included a 7 question portion over dyadic word associations. These included the following: complex vs. simple; confusing vs. clear; clean vs. cluttered; professional vs. unprofessional; attractive vs. unattractive; modern vs. outdated; and organized vs. unorganized. We conducted these same questions on both our new redesign and the existing Craigslist site. The next portion of our testing was a qualitative questionnaire including questions about how the user would use the site or their perceived ability to use the site and rating these perceptions on a scale from 1-5 for both the redesign and current site. We next conducted an open-ended opinion response questionnaire. This allowed the participants to let us know in their own words how they feel about using the site. We included questions about their mood, frustrations, and ease of use whilst looking at both sites.

From our results we noticed that it seems that the old version was perceived clearer than the redesign, but all other markers were improved in the new design. From the qualitative questionnaire, the values of the perception of usability were much higher in the redesign than the current version. From the open-ended response questions, we received “calm” and “innovative” as recurring responses to the new site.

lessons learned

Know the audience. Craigslist had an already dedicated audience for a reason. Managing a redesign to appeal to new audiences without alienating their current audience could be difficult. Knowing a company's history and their product is key.

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