The September, 2009 Issue of Wired
For several years now, I’ve been showing a screen capture of the craigslist.org home page to audiences at various presentations on usability. I ask a simple question. Is this website usable? The audience members, who are generally students, programmers and business people and not members of the design community, invariably return a resounding yes in response to my question. It’s taken for granted. Craigslist, in all it’s glorious straightforwardness, defines usable. Then I proceed to show them how the design breaks a lot of rules – at least by the conventional wisdom of modern web UI designers. For instance, the craigslist home page is crammed full and almost completely lacks any sense of visual heirarchy or prioritization. It provides little to no opportunity for serendipitous discovery of content, only myriad starting options for those who already know what they are looking for. It’s chock-full of cryptic abbreviations. It’s un-visual. It squanders precious screen real-estate on seldom used features. For instance, a full third of the screen is devoted to displaying all the cities where the various Craigslists are located – something which the average user rarely, if ever, has the need to change. Let’s face it, this site is a usability train wreck, right?
Well, few people think so. In fact, most think the opposite. The September issue of Wired hits the newstands soon and the cover story is called “The Tragedy of Craigslist.” The article is a fascinating take on the world’s greatest anti-brand and the Forest Gump-like savants who run it. But at the heart of the piece is a condemnation of Craigslist’s stubborn refusal to evolve it’s UI design and functionality. “On this site, contrary to every principle of usability and common sense, you can’t easily browse pictures of the apartments for rent.” The job postings are a “wasteland of hypertext links, one line after another, without recommendations or networking features or even protection against duplicate postings.” The author, Gary Wolf, rightfully acknowledges craiglist.org’s role as a cultural force and community asset. Indeed, he’s almost offended that the People’s greatest online resource is so stuck in 1995. Don’t the plebes deserve better? Wired goes so far as to commission four “extreme makover” redesigns of the Craigslist homepage by top designers, including a team from Obama’s site and one from the NYTimes.com. All in all, it’s a great piece of writing, and the makeover feature is a lot of fun and I hope they make it a regular feature. After all, serious criticism of UI is rare compared to other cultural works such as books or movies, and I’m thrilled to see it here.
Most People Consider This Highly Usable. Why?
But they missed the point of why the site works in the first place. It’s anti-design is no accident at this point. In fact it’s carefully curated as the Craigslist “brand.” This design screams utilitarian “grass roots” community content that’s built from the ground up. The fact that there is not a professional designer within a 1000 miles of the place is exactly where the site’s authority comes from – and Craig Newmark knows this. The site was already comparitavely underdesigned when it was launched in it’s modern incarnation in 1998. The results of that exercise that I do in my presentations would seem to indicate that the branding works. This site is perceived as more usable than almost anything else out there. This gap between how a user values something because it suits their behavior and how they value it because it hits them on a contemplative, reflective level is at the heart of modern user experience design. Don Norman sounded the call to think this way in Emotional Design, and here’s a great example of the reflective aspects of good design in play. If Craigslist adopted one of the makeover designs in the magazine article they might be dead in the water (although I must admit the contestants showed great restraint and stayed more or less true to the “brand.”) Another example of a product like this is the Bloomberg terminal – a usability nightmare of dense screens and arcane keyboard shortcuts whose users define their self-worth and status in their Wall St. milieu based on their ability to use it. Somewhere in portraying the Craigslist guys as the Internet’s biggest Neanderthals, they seem to have missed the point that the end result is pure UX genius.
#1 by Nigel on August 23rd, 2009
Well said.
#2 by TJ on August 25th, 2009
Obama’s site: I was there the other day to read presidential bios. When I clicked on Harding, I got a 404.
Never got a 404 at Craig’s.
#3 by David in Brooklyn on August 26th, 2009
Actually, Wired’s makeover project for the Craigslist interface *did* result in one good proposal: The “Make It Simple” design. I was drawn to it immediately. It is the only proposal I prefer to CL’s current look, which seems dowdy by comparison. (The other proposals, despite their ostentatious creativity, strangely don’t work any magic.)
#4 by Greg Collier on September 15th, 2009
I applaud Gary Wolf and Wired for the well-researched article on the anomalous characters and odd decisions going on behind the scenes at Craigslist. For a business with this much traffic and this much income, the problems its users encounter day after day, post after post, are really beyond comprehension. They make enough money to fix this stuff, folks – and they refuse to do it!
And that’s not all they refuse to fix. Over the last few years, newspapers and television news stories across the country have been reporting stories about victims – from theft to rape to murder – whose only mistake was responding to a Craigslist ad. Note to Craig: telling us that “most people are good,” is not a sufficient answer! For years, law enforcement agencies have been fighting with Craigslist to clean up the obvious illegal activities on the site – and Craigslist has repeatedly balked or stalled.
The word is spreading that Craigslist is a dangerous place to buy, sell, or look for a date. This is sad state of affairs in an era when technologies exist to ferret out much of the illegal activity, and good old fashioned monitoring can clean up much of the rest – and yet Craigslist resorts to a flag system that, as your article points out, benefits troublemakers as readily as legitimate users. Yes, the criminals are in the minority; I’ll give Craig and Buckmaster that. But the problem is this: more than on any other site I’ve ever seen (and I work in this industry), criminals flock to Craigslist.
Buckmaster’s analogy to GM seems an effort to confuse the issue. Autos come with safety ratings, and manufacturers go to great lengths to ensure their cars’ safety ratings – because people’s lives are at stake. And that’s just the point. Craigslist users have every right to expect that their safety come before some abstract concept of “democracy.”
This is probably the most important difference between Craigslist and the community classifieds site I operate. At Geebo.com, we monitor our community classifieds to make every experience as safe and enjoyable as possible.
We pay attention to our users, and we are constantly improving our technologies and systems. Given how hard we work at this, it’s hard to watch the arrogance and nonsense that go on at Craigslist. When users run into problems there, they get a haiku? Give me a break! Why would anyone intentionally create a system where users’ concerns are mocked rather than addressed?
People aren’t fools: as long as Craigslist refuses to evolve, the site will increasingly be defined by bugs, scams and illegal activities – risks and frustrations that fewer and fewer users will be willing to put up with. Please let your readers know that there are alternatives to Craigslist – including ours. I welcome every Craigslist user to surf on over to Geebo where we work hard to make yours a safe, easy, enjoyable and successful community classifieds experience.
#5 by jim paussa on November 13th, 2009
#4 was a really long ad for geebo.com