Ask HN: What would you change about Craigslist's design? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What would you change about Craigslist's design?

4 pointsericingram10 comments

Curious how others feel about this. Craigslist has a sort of 1999 feel to it. What would you change about its design, if anything?

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I would first make it so that uploaded images aren't mangled so badly. If you ever look closely at an image, you'll notice awful jpeg artifacts. This makes the fact that they're really small even worse.

I would probably also improve the typography (in a subtle way.) Since the site is basically all text, the text that's there ought to look nice. I don't really have a problem with the colors.

Fighting the spam problem is tricky, and I think solving it involves changing the business model, not the design. (I don't have an idea of how I would solve it.)

Categorization of results.. -if I search 'macbook' I would like to see results by various buckets -- Price, Year, etc. -if I search 'sofa set' I would like to see results by Brand, Price, Year

I would change the design to encourage more reporting, and make it harder for bots to crawl.

for some of my searches, 80% of the stuff is spam. Would like the flagged spam to be moved to the bottom.

Many posts show up every single day. Would like the duplicates to be prevented.

If it worked more like HN that would be great.

i would add colors. when you go to the website, the first color that hits you is the disgusting link colored blue. that is very a very 1999 look. add color basically. oh, and take away the peace sign favicon.

More buttons. Clicking on anchors is very anti-fitt's law.

The design honestly doesn't matter to me. I barely go to CL anymore because there's way too many duplicate/spam/scam posts.

Absolutely nothing.

strangely enough i agree with this pretty straight-to-the-point comment. Craiglist is a good example of a good barebones design, and it's not to say craiglist is correct but they've placed importance on clear functionality over beautiful graphics. Others that come to mind following this similar pattern; reddit, hackernews, stackoverflow

Tow things:

no longer automatically remove posts that have been flagged - but show the ad and note to the user that it had been flagged N times.

This is due to the flag for removal abuse that people use to block others from seeing items for sale or places for rent to prevent competition.

Allow me to expand images on items.

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