Redesigning Craigslist
I have been thinking a lot about matching design to purpose recently, particularly as we put the final touches to the way that we are laying out admitfan.
Its just essential that the way that a page looks, feels and responds is totally aligned with what role that page is trying to serve. There are plenty of examples of sites that get this just right, and just as many that haven’t figured it out yet. The ‘Top 50 sites of 2009’ that TIME released last week was a decent longer list of well-designed sites.
If you asked me for the best-of-the-best, I would be hard pushed to not name Craigslist, a site that gets plenty of stick for its simple and ugly interface. The beauty of Craigslist is that it has the perfect design for the purpose its trying to fulfil - helping users find cheap, convenient products and services in their local area. Users expect a bargain from a Craigslist transaction, so the team have designed a web experience that feels budget and cheap (last year Craigslist made $100m a year with a staff of 30; they could afford to update their UI if they wanted to).
So I was interested to read this Wired article this week, which challenged 4 designers to rebuild and redesign Craigslist. They are missing the point. What about exploring how Craigslist is perfectly designed for the purpose it serves? One of the designers they challenged was all over this “Craigslist is working,” says SimpleScott, former design director of BarackObama.com— “why fix what isn’t broken?”
Its all too easy to see something that looks simple and cheap and assume its bad or broken. But maybe there is just as much ‘design’ in the cheap and simple sites as there is in the headier web2.0 flash sites we see so much of today.
