Craigslist Redesigned

This redesign focuses on improving organization and reducing visual clutter while maintaining a lightweight style. The new template was designed to work with craigslist's greatest assets, its popularity and accessibility. Users access craigslist from a variety of devices and over different connection speeds. Also, considering that the site has been used for disaster response, the new design should remain just as responsive and accessible. The new template contains no images or features requiring JavaScript, Flash, or other technologies not supported by all browsers. The redesign presents a clean interface with clearly organized content and 'gets out of the way' of the users.

Founder Craig Newmark on craigslist's strategy:

"[A] big part of our strategy is to get out of the way when something good happens. The best example has to do with people who responded to the Hurricane Katrina disaster by starting to re-purpose our New Orleans site to use it to help people get in contact with survivors or survivors to get into contact with loved ones.

And then, people started using our site to offer housing and, later on, jobs to survivors. The idea there is that that was great stuff. We got out of the way of people doing that. We didn’t care that people were doing different things on the site. So, the idea sometimes, is you’ve got to know when to get out of the way." - Wired Magazine

October 2008.

Tools

Illustrator, Omnigraffle

Methods

Domain research, heuristic evaluation, user scenarios, user-centered design