Give It the Craigslist Test
ericaheinz.com
ericaheinz.com
I check up on the websites of current and former employers, and they've basically all turned into this same template where all the text is vague and lofty while telling you nothing about the company or service("CloudProduct from Tech Corp is the best way to transform your data operations for next generation workloads"), the graphics are all flat corporate Memphis or stock images (no screenshots or demo videos of the actual product), and the pages all do that annoying thing where effects/elements appear and disappear as you scroll down the page.
I don't know, maybe this is the sort of thing that works on product/marketing people but to me it just seems like pointless fluff and makes me not want to look any deeper into the company or product.
In other words it serves as part of the portfolio of your technological prowess. It does not really help the user of the web-site, it helps to fool them into thinking your product must be awesome. The web-site is part of the product, it's the box around the thing you sell.
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Sometimes I want to change industries just so I can order from them all the time.
(Some other business-getting-work-done sites are similar, https://www.uline.com or https://www.grainger.com but they have color and can't compete with McMaster Carr.)
Their target custom is someone who needs to quickly get the item so they can go back to their job; make and price are not their concern -- to the extent that you can just email them and say "give me five more shelves" and their customer support people will look through your purchase history to match the model and paint scheme you bought. Or if you're a power plant, you can tell them to get the part to you RIGHT NOW, and they'll pay a courier to drive it from hundreds of miles away. (These are both true stories.)
McMaster's customer behavior is the dream of almost every industry out there.
It starts with a picture and then you get to the gory details.
I needed to buy some new cutlery. I knew nothing about cutlery, so I went and learned about steel grades, serration types, food service industry standards, etc. In the end, after a few weeks of on-and-off research, I ended up with an excellent WMF set. I told this story to a friend and she laughed, remarking that she would have just gone to the store to get some.
Our needs were the same, but I took a detail-oriented approach focusing on the product, whereas she focused on the solution. Both approaches are valid for our respective priorities, but I'd hazard that the types of people who become engineers (be it software or something else) are more likely to relate to stories like mine.
Most B2B pages will just have a fluffy main page to inspire confidence in doing business with them.
Which, oddly perhaps, has the exact opposite effect on me. Another commenter mentioned McMaster-Carr's website. That one inspires confidence (because it exudes competence).
And oh my, the amount of times I've heard the "the more carousels the better, you can't have too many" arguments..
The reason behind it is a philosophy that you're not selling a product but rather a "solution". If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone explain it with the example "a customer isn't buying a drill, they're buying holes". The example apparently goes back to Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt, and it was popularized in the mid 2000's [1].
It was a legitimate observation around focusing on customer needs rather than your product line, and so what other products or services might you also be able to profitably provide? And in the tech world it turned into helpfully focusing on product-led "use cases" in UX design -- focusing on user flows of how to get things done, rather than individual features that a user can't figure out how to find or combine.
But then it got taken, in my opinion, waaay too far as marketing people started making websites that focus entirely on the "solution" and say next to nothing about the product. The site says "we'll fill all your hole needs!" and the customer is scratching their heads because they can't tell if this is a company that makes hole punches for 3-ring binders, or excavating equipment for your backyard, or drills.
And it's maddening. I share your pain.
Because it's not how consumers think. They think, I want a drill, and I have strong opinions as to whether I want corded or cordless, and to make sure it's compatible with the drill bits I already own. Consumers are generally pretty smart, and have already made the leap from "hole" to "drill".
So I understand where this "we sell hole solutions!" website pattern comes from, but I swear to god I don't understand why people are still doing it. The whole "it's holes not drills" philosophy has turned into a kind of cargo cult inside of a lot of companies, and it's not pretty.
[1] https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/what-customers-want-from-your-pro...
80% of people in Marketing have no idea how to Market.
They just know how to 'do marketing things'.
This took me years to figure out, but there are actually few people who rigorously follow good, established marketing concepts, mostly they just 'make copy' 'make web sites' 'do campaigns' and efforts are often judged aesthetically, or by vanity metrics.
Also, we should admit, we've never had so much selection and perhaps most importantly, we've never lived among such abstract concepts.
You've never been confused at the 'Drill Maker' site. Even if they did talk about 'holes' - that would not matter.
Software is intangible, especially for 'newer' things.
But yes, it's unbelievably problematic, and deeply annoying.
It's a daily sea of confusion.
I've met some very creative ad/marketing people and they're great fun. But they're very much the exception.
Rules of brand are: clarity, consistency, authenticity. While branding is only one part of it 'clarity' can be applied everywhere.
I'm looking at data.ai aka app annie right now and I want to wrangle he marketing team it's ridiculous to try to fathom what all their dumb products do - they only use abstractions.
Literally 5 products that 'increase ROI and help you meet OKRs' or whatever, my god man What the F is it, and what does it do? is the question at hand here.
Admittedly, it's not always so easy but focus should be on that.
I think, and I hate that this is true, but I truly think larger enterprises - and specifically the people who make buying decisions within non-technical departments at larger enterprises - really do prefer to buy “solutions” and not tools.
I’m a product guy through and through and it drives me bonkers when I visit websites that try to sell me holes instead of drills. But I’ve worked with B2B SaaS companies, and when you’re selling to non-technical folks, they do seem to want to buy holes. This is particularly so with sales and sales enablement tools. You’ll get people proudly saying things like (to continue to metaphor) “you know I’m not an engineer so I don’t understand these fancy drills to yours. But I sure do like the holes you guys offer and they’ll make me look really good to our CEO”…
I really dislike those, as the whole screen shudders as it tries to re-layout the presentation. It's especially bad when you're on a phone, and you're suddenly in a different place in the article.
A lot of this is not deliberate. It's just incompetence. Writing good product descriptions for a website is really hard.
How do I know? I write copy for our website. Even though I'm an engineer it still tends to come out as fluff + engineering word salad. It takes multiple iterations to get it right. I have huge respect for people who can do this well.
I stole an idea from Joel Spolskey and made beta features in the app have graphics that were literally drawn in crayon, to make it clear they were unfinished and to make it easy to test changes.
Investors liked the deck. It made it clear that what mattered was the content, not the presentation.
Because, while lots of engineers would like to think that the success of a product is due to the tech and features, the reality is that good market can make a crap product successful a lot more often than a good product can overcome bad marketing and presentation. Craigslist seems to be an exception rather than the rule.
(Don’t ask me how I know)
Dare to stand out. Even if it’s unpopular and immediately pushes away 90% of people. Your goal when dating is not to make everyone like you. It’s to find one person that loves you.
Do be real about who you are and what you care about (innate to you), don't be rude and poorly prepared (not innate to you).
All of us have tendencies that are better repressed. This is why we have a brain.
I'm a sadistic fuck that's been made to have the caring range of a rock due to childhood abuse
I'm fine being that way, it's just not conductive to maintaining relationships. Been there, done the whole 'be yourself bollocks' - the results were shit. Pretending to care far more than I do, and constantly suppressing the sardonic and vindictive tendencies has been far more pleasant
'just tweak core aspects of your personality' is exactly the opposite of being yourself
As a programmer I refuse to waste any cycles on “slightly better than shit programmer art”.
Nope. Colors are magenta, font is Arial, and 3D models are all teapots. It serves two purposes. It signals this is genuinely temp and forces artist/designers to update it.
The danger of making it better is it’s good enough for mocks, shouldn’t ship, but ships because no one took the time to update.
How many dollars were invested as a result?
Good one! Thanks for posting this.
Not only is ranking on appearance faster than usefulness, a rater can confidently do that because their other raters will do the same.
“Tight inter-rater variability” = confidence in rating for some reason, as opposed to consistency in bias.
Given how bureaucrats often travel in large packs and seem to find safety in numbers, maybe it's unsurprising that they would value agreeing with each other over finding the truth.
I had no idea the SEO world had its own bureaucracies of human web-site raters, though. I guess it makes sense that lots of large companies would invest in creating that sort of thing. :(
There are some issues to be aware of here. It isn't possible to do the reverse - to value accuracy over precision - because your accuracy is limited by your precision.
This is a theorem in psychometrics, where the phrasing is that the validity of an assessment (the degree to which it accurately measures some quantity of interest to you) is bounded by the reliability (the degree to which, if you assess the same thing twice, you get similar estimates).
If you find that your assessments aren't accurate enough, you can only fix that by increasing your precision, so the concept of valuing precision over accuracy is a little bit weird.
as an accountant, the timeliness of my work is scrutinized far more than the accuracy as I'm not often given enough time to do my work and if I took an extra day or two to get it right, I would be penalized whereas if I do it wrong but do it on time, no one would usually care or notice
Here's what I believe to be a counter-example: always use "Eastern" when communicating a time if you're not absolutely certain whether it's EDT or EST.
Being precise but wrong is often worse than being accurate but imprecise.
The validity of an assessment ("accuracy" in the parent comment's terminology) measures how closely the result of the assessment corresponds to reality. For your assessment to be useful, you want this to be constrained, so that when you make your measurement, you get a result that is close to the truth.
Reliability ("precision") measures how closely the results of one measurement correspond to those of another measurement. It's possible to have a reliable test with low validity. All results from that test would be tightly clustered, similar to each other, but not indicative of whatever you're actually interested in.
It isn't possible to have an unreliable test with high validity. The unreliability of this impossible test would mean that its results were spread out, dissimilar to each other. But the high validity would mean that the test results clustered around the true value of whatever it is you're measuring.
Of course, if a set of values are all constrained to be close to a particular fixed value ("the truth"), they are also constrained to be close to each other. This is why reliability is necessary for validity.
We also liked that NNTP didn't allow anything but text. No emojis, no pictures.
But yes, there were advantages to modern forum software. This inspired Vladimir Panteleev to write DFeed, a shell and gui around NNTP. It works as you can see here:
and the articles are still accessible by NNTP newsreaders.
Not only do I recommend doing this when building apps or websites initially, but I recommend it for the final product. It ends up being much faster, easier to maintain, easier for people to read, and more accessible.
I have another app in the works that’s using https://picocss.com/ with basically no CSS. It’s great not having to think too much about design elements and focus on only the most important bits of the application.
I agree minimalism for the sake of minimalism is bad design—I don’t advocate for that. What I do advocate for is minimalism for the sake of accessibility, ease of maintenance, improved readability, etc. I'm also not categorically opposed to adding this stuff if needed. What I find is that most of the time its not a great starting point.
Amazingly well done
Edit: oh, and the delete profile button doesn't work.
However, I can’t see how their new approach will be successful either: https://twitter.com/Shpigford/status/1645422615279050758
Why won’t existing companies that already have the users and existing connections fast follow anything the startup does? They are competing head on with billion dollar companies and adding a chat interface and video conferencing as the differentiation.
They have to do all the hard parts to onboard users, convince them to connect with their financial institutions, establish trust with financial recommendations, build a two sided marketplace with financial advisors, yet Mint or wealth front or many other companies could spend six months and have a better product out in the market with an established user base and way of making money.
Why are investors excited by this pivot?
In this case, I think the founders realized that by focusing on UI and data engineering, they were not focused on the right things: what kind of digital financial assistant is worth paying for?
Finally, the question, "why won't big existing player come eat your lunch?" directs conversation away from opportunity. Products like maybe.co often end up being acquired by big, existing players because huge companies often struggle with invention and ideation, and it's often easier to deploy money to buy the kernel of a great product than what happens in most large, risk-adverse companies when innovation requires internal failure after internal failure before success.
> Why are investors excited by this pivot?
I'm not an investor in maybe.co, but I'm much more interested in what they are doing now that they aren't focused on pretty UI. They have a long way to go before they have something, but as they say, keep a good team on the field long enough... and good things happen.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it worked in getting more money from investors because they can call themselves an AI company now!
Lots of folks prefer "Old Reddit".
I'm continually reminded of how 4chan is still a thing.
We admire bare bones web design, spartan blogs, and archeological finds from the 90's web that are still around.
You don't need a design team to build something useful that people will consume.
I'm presently grocery-shopping in another tab, and I am continually amazed at what a terrible UX I put up with. Compare any grocery website to McMaster-Carr and it's not even 10x, it's like 100x worse. But I give them my business because the competition is actually even worse.
"enabling a filter for meat shows recommended items from other categories above the meat products"
"clicking on page 2 of results resets all filters"
"searching for item X returns a list of results that does not contain it, but navigation shows it clearly exists"
etc.
How can it be so bad??
My favorite is when you add a filter when you're on page 2 and now you're on page 2 of the filtered results.
Want me to on board? Probably 70 percent of every grocery trip is the same essentials, so just let me scan my recipes and offer the opportunity to quick select from that list of items next time.
If you want to feel real pain, try using the grocery apps or similar on slow cell signal; it's death. No! I do NOT need a 12 MB image of the bottle of milk I buy each week, I just want to see if it's back in stock!
FWIW I haven't bought any gear from them since that happened, and they used to be my first stop for used equipment.
I think when you are selling to a buyer that knows what they want, its best to stick to a simpler information dense interface (Digikey, McMaster-Carr, etc.). I think a lot of websites try to "chase the trend" and look like Amazon, or whatever, without realizing that it is much harder to get that right than it is to get an ugly page right.
Moderators can see the traffic breakdown and old reddit traffic hovers around 5-10% of total traffic depending on community.
I think the "loud minority" is a concept that is very very applicable here.
I think it speaks volumes that Old Reddit hasn't been removed. Even the maintenance burden of continually supporting it is outweighed by its value.
But what do I know? TikTok is a thing, apparently.
Old man proceeds outside to yell at the Cloud
... and also clearly none of the reddit development team is using it either. How else would they miss a breaking bug for five years?! It's not like inputting text is a niche feature.
When I knew about the old version, I tried. And wow, almost every bugs I had with the new one went away. Faster load too.
Old Reddit is of course so much better. I guess “new” Reddit is shitty either due to the requirements of monetization, or maybe second-system syndrome.
I think the Craigslist test is good, but it is interesting to note that the first, thrown together interface could possibly provide a “false positive,” in the sense that the first implementation could have the advantages of not expecting to be monetized yet, and not having been infected too much by current design fads.
"Focus on content and functionality when you’re designing new products; that’s the validation that will build a business."
Now I'm going to add this article to required reading for new engineering team members.
Regardless, I can’t agree with you more about functionality and reliability. Functionality sells, and reliability keeps it sold.
I'm sure one could make a case for 'if they buy it it was good' but I suggest people are easily manipulated, especially when confronted with a massive machine with $Billions to figure how to.
But even with both of those things said - I think it is still actually crappy because 1) the click through may be optimized and yet some information could be available to make it better that may not affect click through and 2) the 'long term funnel' may be affected by maligned customers; I avoid Amazon, I suggest others might as well though it may not be that many.
I'm convinced that design regularly impacts a feature's usefulness, but is rarely necessary to make it useful at all. That is: it's important but not required.
Of course this is for a captive audience. For something you're trying to sell, window dressing can matter.
The advice in this article applies even to literal mockups you do as part of regular development (ie: even as part of adding new features to an existing, polished product).
The more "real" your mockup looks, the more concrete it looks and, even if unconsciously. With high-fidelity mockups, you'll typically get feedback about font choice, colors, spacing and other trivial bits.
If you do low-fidelity, you'll get feedback like "why does this data have to be a table?" "Can we just not have these input fields, and move them to advanced options?" "Woah, I thought this would be an entirely different workflow, like (example)".
In the first pass, Low-fidelity can be as low quality as a whiteboard, sharpie or mspaint. If it takes more than a couple minutes to draw (not including thinking / discussion time) it's probably too detailed.
There’s no magic gene for this, it’s just the willingness and ability to navigate a large design space.
I'm reminded of Adam Savage's observation that practice alone gets you 80% of the way to mastery. Talent is what gets you the last 20%, but for most things, 80% is good enough.
I'm a developer and writer, not a designer.
I'm a bottom up kind of guy, I want to get the things work correctly, without building mockups or a strategy first. Iterative creations, you know?
Obviously, non-technical people have to do it the other way around, so most resources you find online focus on the top down approach.
PLEASE USE LARGER FONTS.
One thing I hate about modern design is the use of microscopic fonts with giant margins around them. Often with poor contrast.
The whole "material UI" is built like this.
There are large empty margins around each line. That grow if you try to increase the scale. If these margins were decreased, you could have seen more information on one screen.
Hacker news is actually an example of this. I usually zoom in by 110%.
Maybe my eyes are getting worse.
Craigslist is/was largely where things get listed that don't have a specialized site that fulfills those at least 2 of those. E.g. etsy, ebay, stubhub, online dating, rideshares, gigs
https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/craigslist-...
Image from above link: https://i.insider.com/4dd4d1cf4bd7c8c90f000000
And the Craigslist interface is damn close to a classified section in a paper.
I mean, they could also pay you, the content creator, but yeah, that wouldn’t work as well on a classified ad website.
PMs & engs typically don't have Figma editor rights (I worked with a PM who briefly had it once, and then had it revoked for stepping out of line) or Figma knowledge to brainstorm ideas.
And a 4th reason: high-fidelity mocks encourage snowflake "Figma being used as a new Photoshop" to do novel pixel-perfect layouts instead of the design system's stock/boring layouts.
I encounter this, all the time. Highly polished UX, and crap functionality (or buggy functionality).
In the app we're developing, we spent a lot of time, prototyping the functionality, with a mediocre UX. Once we had decided on it, I refined the business logic into a standalone module, and we're redoing the UX, with a designer.
Here's the docs: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/change-fonts-and-colors...
Anyway everything ends up looking like craigslist and it's nice if you're into that. Probably a good way to POC with this idea.
Using it as an example for MVP of your design is ludicrous.
Craigslist networking is mostly local, so some places there's not much in the way of listings (for jobs, services, marketplace, etc) and some places only one category is popular and some places you would find your job, your apartment, your furniture, and before personals went away, maybe your spouse.
Contrast that to the thing that is replacing it: Facebook marketplace. It's beautiful, but, the barrier to entry is high, there is no practical way to browse specific categories, search shows tons of irrelevant results, there is no way to set up keyword or category alerts, and it's riddled with scams and flakes. The entire object of FB is not to get anything done, it's to keep you scrolling for as long as possible.
(Also, if you think Craigslist "has no incentive to change", you probably haven't used it in a while. It was rebuilt — 5+ years ago now! — as a modern HTML5 website that only vaguely resembles its previous HTML4 minimal-CSS no-JS approach. But even that old design was extremely usable.)
2. Like others have said, Craigslist's design is not user hostile.