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Comment by SlightRespect | Hacker News Reader

Craigslist is _the_ case study on how an ugly UI can survive over a long timeline. There are many techies and UI designers that are just disgusted at the UI of craigslist. For some, aesthetic is more important than usability. Luckily, for most, it's not.

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Not to forget amazon.com. I am actually in awe of their boldness in completely ignoring UI design trends.

I think that has a lot to do with Bezos saying "no" when it matters, like Jobs did at Apple.

they probably follow the money instead of trends.

Amazon has purposefully broken their search and navigation, but probably in an anti-consumer metric-driven way instead of designer-driven.

Ebay is the pinnacle of broken search and navigation! They should be winning awards, industry accolades, Webbies, the works!

Yes, both Amazon and EBay are bad examples.

They are old-school because they are lazy about it, not because something is already optimized.

Whenever I hear about how great a Amazon is as a company, I just do a single search and am dumbfounded.

Example:

If you type the name of a product - even when it is in their catalogue - it may not come up.

Search for 'mousr' on Amazon and you only see PC mouses.

The only way you can get to the mousr product is by typing the company name.

It's ridiculous.

Tip of the iceberg.

I find eBay search more predictable than amazon. When I use amazon I feel that they show to me what they think I should get instead of what I want.

Ebay removed substring search years ago, and this basically collapsed a whole bunch of industries that were using Ebay as their marketplace. Think hundreds of thousands of similar part numbers. This is why you see pages of part numbers blasted over the listing details.

Ebay's one job is to connect buyers and sellers and they fail miserably at that.

Not even a local minimum, a global minimum. Not a platform, a gated swamp.

I can sort by price on eBay. On Amazon, I have to jump through a bunch of hoops to finally be able to sort by price, and the results I get are far from exhaustive.

I find eBay search pretty fine for my purposes. They could allow for more fine-gained structured descriptions, though.

Amazon search is in comparison much more... approximate.

Well, minus their shit video streaming site, I agree.

Amazon's interface is pretty bad, though, especially in the video and kindle areas. I know I'm constantly frustrated using the site, and as far as I can tell, they don't appear to be very interested in reducing user's pain.

Yes exactly. CL is probably my favorite website on the internet, for the sheer reason that they have virtually not changed at all since they first launched over 10 years ago. It's fairly incredible. I can't think of another website that has done that.

http://rinkworks.com/

holy shit

This still exists?! It's still being updated?!?! So much more content than when I last checked it, which would have been 2004 or so. My faith in the internet is restored.

CL is only ten years old? I always figured it was from the 90s — maybe a bias originating from the design.

It's over 20 years old, it launched in 1996. Time flies.

oh wow, I stand corrected. I always thought it was 10 years old because I discovered it around 2008. Sheesh.

Remember Windows XP?

Fun fact: we're further away from its first release (2001), than it was from Windows 1.0 (1985).

Remember Windows 7?

We're further away from its first release (2009), than it was from XP.

Win7 certainly has some rough edges in retrospect, but I occasionally interact with old systems and so many things are so much snappier. I'm sure the modern frameworks in Win10 allow for "new experiences" but the plain old desktop experience was well served by Win7.

And those of us who do remember Windows 1.0 (not using it, though, but I do remember the ads), are probably mostly closer to retirement age than to the start of our careers... I feel old now.

Craigslist was a true innovation when it started.

I don't think the Berkshire Hathaway site has changed much:

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

Amazing

> I can't think of another website that has done that.

Hmm, I'll give you a hint. You're looking at it.

> I can't think of another website that has done that.

https://news.ycombinator.com

Craigslist is _the_ case study on how an ugly UI can survive over a long timeline.

I wouldn't call the CL UI ugly. It's certainly not beautiful, but I'm not sure how it could be described as ugly. There's something in between, right?

It's not aesthetically polished, but it's well though-out. So it works.

I think craigslist survives _despite_ its ugly UI just because of market lock-in/inertia. the ui is awful from a utility/ux, pov - it’s limited and hard to shop/browse with.

Definitely - there used to be a bunch of sites that scraped craigslist and put their listings into more browse-able formats (e.g. Padmapper), but once they got too popular, CL started sending C&Ds and filing lawsuits.