Kijana KnightOctober 12, 2006i385e - Information Architecture ISite Critique and Redesign of craigslist.orgIntroductionCraigslist (www.craigslist.com) is an online compendium of community resources.The site provides free classifieds, forums, event listings, personal ads, and the founder’sblog. The site was started in 1995 by Craig Newmark as a way to inform people in San Francisco of interesting upcoming events. As community members started posting job ads and classifieds, the list grew into the site that it is today. The site prides itself on be-ing “non-commercial” and free and open to everyone by not charging for postings (ex-cept for job postings). In addition, the openness of the site fosters a community sense of pride, simplicity, and trust. The site’s concept, to keep things “simple, common-sense, down-to-earth, honest, very real” is reflected in the bare-bones and almost bor-ing layout. This has not affected the popularity of the site. As of June 2006, 310 cities worldwide are listed on the site and there are over 2 billion page views per month. (Wikipedia, 2006)Despite the fact that the site is incredibly popular and highly utilized, the interface is clunky and overwhelming. The main page consists of text links to the underlying data.Discarding fancy graphics or photos ensures that the site will load quickly without any broken images. The abundance of links also provides visibility into the structure of the site. If a user does not know for sure what he is looking for, browsing the site becomes a daunting task. There are too many choices immediately available. (Schwartz, 2004). The site invites browsing, but is certainly more usable by those who know exactly what to search for.This goal of this site re-design is to make the site less daunting and the data load more reasonable for browsing. Since the current layout is very familiar to a large audi-ence, the re-design will attempt to improve certain features of the site while remaining true to the design aesthetic.User AudienceAnyone on the planet is a potential member of craigslist’s user audience. The site is utilized by people posting ads, events, and personals, but it is open to anyone to browse. Possible user scenarios:•A student looking for a used couch in a nearby neighborhood.•A recent graduate who is relocating to a certain city and would like to know more about the city and what housing options are available.•An artist seeking to swap a commissioned piece of artwork for car maintenance.•A band posting it’s concert tour dates.•A traveller looking for a place to stay when she visits Ireland.The amazing depth of resources available on craigslist makes it possible for any-one in almost any situation to connect with someone offering or requesting that service or item. Therefore, users of the site should be able to post and update ads easily, search for similar items, and access the site whenever they need to. Longtime users probably trust the site invariably, but newcomers may need to be assured of the site’s veracity. Typically, a prominent company logo would begin to accomplish this task. Cur-rently, the word “craigslist” is in the upper left hand corner. It is not immediately obvious that it is a link to somewhere else. A better-defined logo would be “the universal adapta-tion of the logo as a key element used in the identification and advertising of a product or service.” (Conlon, 2003)LabelingPerhaps the most puzzling thing about the craigslist site is the location listing. This is a list of U.S. states and cities, countries, and international cities (Canada in-cluded). It is difficult to just glance at the list and know the extent of its content. Having everything listed, it is great to have the visibility into the structure. However, the cate-gories are a bit ambiguous. For example, “us cities” does not contain a list of all the U.S. cities - it is only a partial list of what one can assume to be a “most visited” or “mostpopular” city, according to site statistics. After clicking on the “us cities” category link, I was able to see the entire list. This should not be hidden from the user in this way.After a city is selected, the page context changes to reflect the listings and offer-ings for the current city. This city is shown as the masthead for the page. A little “w” su-per-script appears next to the city title on the page. It is not apparent what this is until the user mouses over the letter itself. If the user is observant, she will notice, at the bot-tom of her browser window, that the “w” is actually a hyper link to a Wikipedia page on the city.The new site will make the link obvious by la-beling it “learn more about [city]” (i.e. “learnmore about austin”). It will link to a chamber of commerce page or the best site for the most authoritative information on the city.The locations have been updated to be hidden behind a search box. The user will be able to type a city name into the search box. If the city is not yet in the craigslist architecture, the user will get a result window stating that the city could not be found andasking if he or she would like to request to have the cityadded to craigslist.Now, instead of three long columns of incon-sistently related place names, the site has a separate page that users can browse. This “cities page” is accessi- ble from under the “city search box”. A link di- rects the user to browse the city search page if he or she does not know what city to enter. Below that, a drop-down menu contains areas of the specified city. Sometimes, the listings and ads vary byarea (i.e. San Francisco has the “North Bay” and “East Bay” areas). This will allow the users to refine their search if the distinction is made available (some cities are not bro-ken down by area). NavigationThe focus of the original craigslist site seems to be the large area of text links thatpoint users towards postings. While this is the main function of the site, other features, such as “search craigslist”, “my account”, and the event calendar are eclipsed and are thus not immediately obvious. When craigslist was created, it was a listing of area events and happenings. The redesigned site will once again feature the events calen-dar prominently as it is an obvious and unique feature of each city.Move these features into a more prominent location on thepage.The redesign has