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.