Craigslist has one of the worst UX. How come has it not been improved in years?
Why doesn't Craigslist get any competition? It should be trivial to implement something that's 10 times better...
Why doesn't Craigslist get any competition? It should be trivial to implement something that's 10 times better...
Also, on a personal level, I've come to appreciate CL's design, and I very much appreciate its consistency. I don't use CL all the time - I go to it sometimes for things like furniture I know I can't get too attached to, or rental listings. It took a little time investment maybe 15 years ago to learn how the site worked, but once you know how it works, it's fairly easy to navigate, and they have never required me to relearn the site, no matter how long I go without using it. There's serious value in that. Add in the network effect that's killing the new apps trying to challenge it and you have a behemoth.
Wasn't that all because they entirely changed the content model though? It wasn't just a UI change. Wasn't it because paid-for-junk was going to be most of what was in your face or something of that nature?
I wish more sites would go retro. It really is a breath of fresh air after so many sites that make me feel like I'm fighting my way through the "experience" they're trying to shove down my series of tubes.
Competing in the low end means that its a volume based game because each unit of value (each craigslist posting) is low. A new company trying to gain momentum capturing a small user base does't work because in this smaller stage of the company you have no network effects.
If you try to steal those low end customers with a 10x product, you will spend a ton of money to capture users that aren't very valuable.
If you make something that adds 10x more value, with people who want 10x in value, then by design you work yourself out of Craigslist's turf like AirBnB (they started hacky low end but now are moving into higher end listings to drive growth).
in short, I believe there is a valley of death when you try "siege tactics" on Craigslist's network effects.
Craigslist is so popular because of its simplicity. It's quick. It's light. It's easy.
It works and it works well.
I don't think there are many potential customers out there thinking "You know what the world needs? Craigslist for web 2.0 with AJAX, JSON, HTML5 and Flash elements."
If you think I'm misreading the marketplace, please feel free to launch your own competitor. I'll happily check it out, at least once.
I also disagree, I think overall usage to complete your goal is fine, it looks a little old but whatever.
Listings can be a mixed bag, but that's entirely user data so it's hard to fault Craigslist too much. IMHO it's better than having some 5 page form you have to fill out every time you list something which people will just screw up anyway.
- Buy a car. Poor make/model/year metadata requires loose searches to identify cars with keywords. So you end up sorting through irrelevant cars, or missing out on the ones you want to see.
- Find an apartment. Map search was finally introduced after Padmapper did it. Before then, you could search by the names of neighborhoods, but then you'd have the same problem: sort through tons of mis-categorized results, or miss out on the apartments you wanted to see.
- Buy used electronics. Again, poor category metadata. Want to buy a MacBook Pro, or iPhone 7? Good luck manually sorting through results that include the word "retina" or "non-retina" - or similar issues.
- Advertise your business. Great news, ads are free! Bad news: the flagging system is terribly abused, and there's no recourse because "it's free" and "the community does the flagging".
In all these cases, whether I'm the buyer or the seller, I'd much rather pay a small transaction fee or advertising fee for a better marketplace. But usually, craigslist dominates. They don't dominate because the product is good, they dominate because of network effects and an artificially low (free) price for most listing categories.
That is a thing of beauty.
>> That is a thing of beauty.
I really find it sad that it's such an anomaly.
Heh, well unfortunately the web doesn't get much in the way of alternative : (
Because it works. It's simply, "good enough.
Believe it or not, non-tech people do not want to learn the latest, greatest UI. They want it to work. Full stop. The shiny new attack surfaces....er,... features and the vicious circle of security breaches & updates may well extinguish the public's enthusiasm for "new". Ever see an average Iphone or Android user after a nightly upgrade? It isn't pretty when a user's functionality/productivity is torpedoed by a new design +/- features of new OS. As a tech savvy pro, however, YMMV.
Competition for craigslist is hard because of network effects.
What would you be optimizing for? What changes could you make that wouldn't increase the page size or slow the loading speed?
- Stop using abbreviations everywhere (at least in the French version)
- Add structure and semantics to content (not just some blank text fields where people type arbitrary descriptions)
- Improve classification using image recognition and mechanical turks
- Make an open API available
- Get rid of sub-domains
- Add trust/reputation mechanisms
This seems like a good idea on the surface but it's ultimately exclusionary. If I want to sell something really occasionally how much trouble do have to go through to maintain this reputation.
As it stands, I still can't participate in stack overflow effectively because of their heavy-handed reputation system.
Wtf is wrong with subdomains?
There's nothing inconsistent about the UI.
Are you kidding me?
- Alerts
- Some kind of historical record of ads
- Increased focus on listing from your mobile phone (camera)
https://www.craigslist.org/about/saved_searches_and_alerts
Learned it once, done, works when I need it.
As it stands, they've chosen to make the people who don't use the site miserable.
I'm not sure why you'd expect them to make the people who do use it miserable.