Improve Craigslist?

Almost a year ago now, I interviewed with an SEO company here in Seattle. I was excited by the prospect of getting a non-service job, and thrilled that the crash course I had given myself in SEO and ‘netspeak in the four days between sending in my resume and gaining an interview had prepared me for such questions as “What does RSS stand for?” and “what are some of the factors involved in SERP rankings?” I was confident, that is, until the interviewer threw me a subtle stunner that laid me low: “How would you improve craigslist?”

I was stumped. After a minute or so of “uh…nurr” I think I managed to squeak something out about the font. The font! Swing and a miss! I was not called back for the second round of interviews.

In the interviening time I’ve grown more and more interested in web design, usability and optimization. I’ve also (mercifully) switched jobs and now spend a good portion of my day surfing websites, exposing myself to all sorts of clever and not-so-clever layout and usability strategies. Recently, I remembered that stumper of a question from back in August. And started to look at craigslist with new eyes. Here’s some of what I came up with.

It’s a good question. Craigslist is one of those sites that most of us have used for so long that we don’t really ‘see’ it anymore. Generally we know what we’re looking for when we get there, so rather than actually reading through the page of almost-uniformly tiny text, we automatically look towards the part of the page that holds the link we want, or else we click on the purple links that indicate where we’ve been recently.

So, to start out, I should say in answering this question that I don’t particularly feel like there’s anything wrong with craigslist. It might be a little extreme to cover you entire home page head to toe with anonymous blue hyperlinks, but overall I think it’s a good strategy for what they’re trying to achieve: they need to direct you through a LOT of different content, and they want to set things up so that you can get where you’re going with the minimum number of clicks. The easiest way to do this is to avoid ‘trees’ and long hierarchies.

However, this strategy is prone to breakdown. One situation where this happens is with ‘catch-all’ catagories and ones that have an extremely high volume of content—take the “Free” section as an extreme example. Right now there are almost 300 postings for Monday alone; you have to hit the ‘next’ button twice just to get to yesterday.

This poses two problems: first, it’s hard to ‘shop’ the free section—you’re pretty much limited to browsing through whatever random items happen to be at the top of the list when you hit the page. Second, if you’re a seller (or giver in this case, I guess), any one posting will only reach a small sub-section of potential receivers. The advertisement you posted for those “free law textbooks” or “OLDER ORGAN” (two real examples from the screen in front of me) will be stale by mid-afternoon—relegated to page three, buried under a mountain of somebody else’s “free emergency rations” and “Body by Jake Bun Machine.” Reaching someone who’s willing to come and cart away your cast-offs will probably require frequent re-postings.

Sadly, there’s not a lot that craigslist can do about this phenomenon without drastically changing its interface. It’s tempting to break up catch-all categories into finer-tuned subheadings (“free-electronics” “free-perishables”), but to make any real dent in the number of postings in a high-volume category with this strategy, you’d have to multiply them all out of hand, which forces your user to squint through pages of lists to narrow things down to manageable proportions. You also multiply the necessity of posting the same item to multiple categories, which is just as labor-intensive as posting an item to the same category over and over again.

One possibility would be for craigslist to adopt poster-selected tags that could be attached to each item, a la Digg and del.ici.us. This would make it easier for users to find similar items, and also take some of the keyword guesswork out of searches.

Another Craigslist problem, one that could be fixed relatively easily, is the lack of differentiation between postings. As it is, the only way you can make your post jump out is by YELLING or Taking Up A Lot of Space So That Your Posting Title Runs All The Way To The Left Margin! (Often used in combination with yelling by those with no shame). Craigslist allows pictures, but confines them to the posting page. Why they don’t allow thumbnails on the listing page like eBay does? It sure would help break the monotony of those long blue columns.

In general, I dig the balls-out anachronism of it all. There’s even something charming about their curmudgeoney hold-out mentality and their retro late-nineties chic. But sometimes it feels like craigslist refuses to change just to remind you that they were doing user-generated content way before user-generated content was cool. But c’mon guys, we’ll give you all the kudos you want—just give us a break.