This week at SXSW Interactive Blue Flavor’s Creative Director Keith Robinson, along with Paul Nixon, Cameron Moll, Ryan Sims and Andrei Herasimchuck took on craigslist for the popular Design Eye for the ______ series of website makeovers.
After Keith did some research on how people feel and use craigslist, Paul took on the rebranding, introducing an identity system, that still maintains craigslist local feel. Cameron Moll talked about how to creating a mobile version of the site, and Ryan Sims put together a realigned version that is true to Craig’s spirit… and file size. Andrei, who couldn’t attend was live via iSight did an excellent job with the information architecture and information design.
The audience loved it, including one guy in the audience named Craig Newmark, who came up on stage during the Q&A.
The “Design Fab Five” were admitted very nervous about taking on craigslist, feeling it wasn’t really broken to begin with. But the buzz and the rest of SXSW was that everyone was pretty pleased with the results, feeling that even a moderate design realignment made the site easier to use and added a little more professionalism and trustworthiness to such a great site.
Congrats to Keith and the rest of the Design Eye guys! Nice work!
The guys did a great job. They managed to keep things simple and very easy to use but also gave the site a professional look, which in my opinion was kind of missing. I think craigslist should consider a redesign, it certainly won’t hurt it, because when you reach that level of notoriety you should care more about your image.
It’s definitely a cleaner UI. The typography is excellent as is the centered four column design. It does look like some items were overlooked.
1.) The main category titles look like hyperlinks (same color as the sub-category hyperlinks) but they’re not really hyperlinks. Users will be confused by this. On the regular craigslist if you can’t click into the main category (as is the case with personals) the label color (black) is differentiated from the rest of the otherwise clickable category titles.
2.) The all cities section is still incredibly difficult to use. Since it’s just a big blob of alphabetically organized cities in a paragraph there are no indexes for the human eye to reference when attempting to locate the one city the user is seeking. In addition the more popular cities are bolded which makes it even more difficult to see the less popular cities. We’ve already taken care of the popular-city-users at the top of the page so why are we giving them special (bolded) treatment in the all cities section? One possible improvement would be to somehow alphabetically group the cities by the first character in the city name. The number of craigslist cities is growing all the time so it would be nice to choose a scalable design. In fact they’re probably going to need to break the cities down by state now that the smaller cities (Bellingham) are starting to get their own craigslists.
Overall I think the redesign is a classic example of how the space around the text is just as important as the text itself. Nice work.