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Comment by spqr0a1 | Hacker News Reader

Have yet to use the mobile apps, but kudos to the Craigslist team for making their website one of the best mobile experiences out there. Loads quickly, easy to navigate, and isn't missing features compared to desktop. Certainly doesn't have the look we expect from a modern website but there's a level of usability we can all aspire to.

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I find craigslist's fast loading pages to be problematic.

I think their website would be improved by rewriting it entirely in JavaScript, transpiling the JavaScript to JavaScript, requiring the JavaScript to render, re-implementing the entire UI in JavaScript including hyperlinks, then running JavaScript on the server to generate HTML, sending the HTML to the browser, also sending the JavaScript bundle with megabytes of hipster fonts and random people's github repos to insert spaces in a string and stuff, then finally re-rendering the client's page after the multi-megabyte JavaScript bundle finishes downloading.

Now that is the nice modern user experience I have come to demand as a user in 2019.

Don’t forget breaking the back button miserably and ensuring there are no URL’s that can be copied and pasted.

Also to spam about using cookies and ask for the location data every single time you visit.

Ah the ultimate Single Page Abomination (as I jokingly call it even though I do my own at work but everything has its place).

Course Svelte is what might be the game changer in this regard.

You forgot notification permissions.

I really wish I could tell the browser to default those to "Nope" for me.

I'm sure you can, at least on Safari. The default is "ask" but you can change it to "deny". I'd be surprised if other browsers don't allow this.

You can in Chrome and Firefox, it's buried in the config setting though.

> ensuring there are no URL’s that can be copied and pasted

Google maps does this with addresses. Why can't they just let someone copy the text. I don't understand why it's so purposefully hostile to users.

You mean Magento??

If a site feels unusable like this it's because you're the not the user. News sites, for example, are SPAs because they want to sell you ads. It has nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with the business using it.

You can still do ads (and they have been done for decades) without SPAs. In fact SPAs would reduce the efficiency of the ad tracking as the ad JS is now competing for resources with the SPA JS.

The point is if their goal was to just serve news or articles the site would be just thin layer over a CDN serving raw HTML. In order to serve and track dynamic advertisements they build sites with MBs of JavaScript instead.

How are SPA-s and displaying ads related? The reload / page model benefits news sites more since they can generate more pageviews and hence ad reloads. There really is no connections. Devs implement SPA-s because they think it's better user experience (yes, it's hard to get it right).

I doubt anyone relying on ad revenue to run a business equates pageviews with HTTP requests to the server anymore.

Which news sites are SPA's? I haven't seen that. Most are usable without javsacript, though the experience is diminished and some have such harsh lazy-loading that the images are all invisible. And menus/search may be broken. I've never had a problem with navigation, though.

Don't forget browser compatibility IE10 and up with an extra 10mb of polyfills...

It saddens me that people learn to write "Hello World" on a website after downloading 1200 packages from npm...

I feel personally attacked

Reading that stressed me out so much.

I came for this and was not disappointed. Please continue.

Strongly disagree that Craigslist should be held up as an example of a usable website.

The Web 1.0 look is fine.

But if you use CL a lot you'll know how bad the UX is, especially on mobile, especially compared to mobile-first camera-focused apps.

I can think of 5-10 incredibly annoying non-standard Craigslist UX elements off the top of my head.

You didn’t actually mention any specific criticisms.

- there aren't great ways for people to offer multiple items apart from making one listing with all the stuff (And having to update all the time)

- You have to do the whole "negotiate payment mechansim and shipping" thing every time. They could easily provide a sort of flow for when an agreement has happened

- On the buyer side you gotta basically just go in and delete your listing when it's done

There's an alternate universe in craigslist where you could somehow signal "I have a potential buyer" to put the thing in hold, and a single-button finalisation step when its done. Similarly, sellers could be able to register certain info to just plop it into a message.

I understand that the existing UX (mainly e-mail forwarding) makes this hard. But... well maybe they can change their UX

These are valid issues but I think they aren't a big deal. Every other platform I've seen that tries to be "smart" and offer these features ends up overdoing it and making it way too complicated & time consuming to post an ad for the first time.

CL in contrast is easy & understandable. You post an ad, post a price, and done. No "profile" or "account" to manage, etc.

After using letgo to buy and sell I will never use craigslist again. Night and day in terms of usability.

> I can think of 5-10 incredibly annoying non-standard Craigslist UX elements off the top of my head.

Yes?

Here's a quick one (of many).

In every dropdown menu you've ever used, the currently selected item pops up in the center of the control. The other items are arranged above and below the currently selected item.

https://i.imgur.com/H7Mrs6B.png

Craigslist's view selector instead lays out the items below the control. "List" is always placed within the control, despite not being active. To select "List" you need to click what should be the currently selected item.

https://i.imgur.com/UPlljil.png

Completely unnatural experience and still trips me up every time I use it.

This is subjective, and also wrong. It's wrong because I use dropdowns all the time that always extend the entire list downward. I just double checked gmail and feedly for my own sanity. It's subjective because there is an advantage to static positioning: it allows the mind to develop a map of where each item is in non-relativistic terms, so selecting a given value is always the same two clicks.

Feedly and Gmail drop the entire menu down below the control. You're right, those kind of custom menus work fine. Note that the currently selected item is still always shown within the custom control.

https://i.imgur.com/kd83CAK.png

Craigslist positions the first item of the static list within the control, forcing you to awkwardly select the control itself to select the first item. I have to think about it literally every time I use that drop down.

https://i.imgur.com/UPlljil.png

The Craigslist UX is FAR superior than almost any other mobile UX. I use craigslist literally every day, and I praise its mobile design. If I could disagree with you on your assessment any more strongly, I would.

CL desktop works pretty damn good on mobile if you don't mind pinching and zooming.

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