Craigslist Redesign

                                                                  User Study by Darren

 

The website for our group DuoX to analysis is craigslist.

To conduct user study on this website, I invited my friend whom I call Z.[1].  Z. is a female and majors in library and information sciences. She had a background in history and loves reading online [2].

The task I gave to Z. are as follows [3]:

• Redirect into the city of St. Louis  

• Sell your piano

• Find the book you want

• Find coming interesting event in Chicago

 

Before the survey, I told her that we were doing a user study, just she should be natural when doing the task. Also, I emphasized that if she cannot or struggled to finish one of the task, “it’s totally Ok, it’s not your problem, it’s the website that should be to blame [3,9].   

  

For the first task, I asked him to locate to the home page of St. Louis in Craigslist. He started by scanning the webpage from left to right. Then she found the US states (figure 1), selected Missouri state first, and selected the St. Louis [4]. Although She found it at last, but it seemed like she overlooked the tag “nearby CL” which lists all the current local cities, and it would be faster to locate to St. Louis [5,6]. So there is definitely an improvement needed for emphasizing the “nearby CL” tag [8].

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                                                figure 1

 

In the second task, she started by clicking “post to classifieds” (figure 2) and followed the instructions step by step： type of posting -> choose a category->and filled a form about the details of product needed to be post [4]. During these steps, she was required to create a new account. All these steps seemed to be natural and logical. She succeeded finished this task with less effort. I assumed that she finished this task effortlessly because the “post to classifieds” tag is highlighted with different color and is placed on the very top left that is easy to identify. [8]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                     figure 2

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In the third task, she was asked to find a book she wanted. She scanned through all the category and located to the “for sale” tag, then found the books link. After clicking the book link, she accessed the “all books and magazines” page where she tried to enter the book name “peak performance” [4]. Although there is no book matched the named she wanted, but the whole process was in the right track. Then I asked her to choose another way to find the book she wanted. She wondered a while on the homepage and found the search box where she entered the book name. However, she was brought into a page where default section is “for sale->all” not “for sale -> books” (see figure 3) [7]. Apparently, the search box algorithm sets the default section (page) based on the largest item number related to the keywords [8].

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                                                              figure 3

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The last task, she was asked to explore the incoming event to be held in Chicago. She firstly tried the Event link in the Service tag and then tried the Event link in the gigs tag but found two different results which were not incoming event to be held in Chicago [4]. Then I re-emphasized that she needed to find INCOMING event. “Should it be in the section of community as people try to discuss future event in this section?” She asked.  “I am not sure, but you can try it” I replied [3]. Then she opened the event link on this section, still, no event was related to Chicago [5]. She told me there was probably no event posted on this website would be held in Chicago.  I have to say she failed this task. Below are the links she tried.  To my surprise, she did not try the event calendar section on the left of the homepage [7]. I assume that the reason why she did not notice the event calendar is that “event calendar” might give user an illusion that it’s just a calendar and the dates seem like not clickable [8]

(see figure 4).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                    figure 4

 

 

Redesign Speculations:

1. the first suggestion would be to enlarge the tag of “nearby CL” and change a different color to be identified easier.

2. Highlight the search box which is a critical part of the whole website. To be more specific, the font of “search craigslist” and search box size should be larger. The search box can be placed in the right top corner which is more common.

3. Change the “event calendar” to “Incoming Event”, and highlight the days with event number larger than a certain value.