Competitive Analysis
Craigslist is a dominant force in the online resale market. There are a few other similar websites doing the design right. We will take a look at letgo to analyze its user interface and how it does things better or worse and try to get some cues for the re-design of Craigslist.
Included above is the screen shot of the landing page of letgo. letgo has grown to become one of the most popular free apps to buy and sell used goods. They have recorded 75M downloads. letgo is definitely doing somethings right which make them a more popular choice. As we are interested in its design, we will start there.
As we are focused on the ease of search, we can immediately see from the design of letgo things that they are doing right.
Some important design elements to note
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Position of search box – Easily found expected location. Very good visibility which is very intuitive for a user to focus on.
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Landing page directly lists all items for sale – if the item the user is looking for is first on the page then the user will only take 1 step to accomplish the search which takes 4 steps on craigslist
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Left side category menu – Easy to read and intuitive categories which help filtering and browsing for items much more easy
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Use of hamburger menu to hide all other menu items giving a very header region for the search box to be very visible with no distractions
We can take a lot of design cues from letgo and implement on Craigslist to improve its design and in turn improve search functionality.