Intro to Design and Usability

Craigslist:

I think bare-bones is the best style for craigslist because of the nature of the site. The design has to work for users all over the world, with a wide variety of connection speeds and operating systems and quirky browsers. On top of that, all of craigslist’s content is user generated under the same wide range of circumstances. The design has to work as well for someone advertising a job in Mexico City as it does for someone looking for a free couch in London.

I’ve used craigslist plenty of times but I’ve never given much thought to the design of that site, to be honest I’d always assumed the layout reflected what sections had the most posts, kind of like a tag cloud in a blog. But looking at it for this assignment I noticed that it’s the same frontpage layout and design for craigslist/losangeles as for craigslist/kuwait, craigslist/kolkata, etc. That all the homepages have the same layout makes me think that they actually put a lot of thought into what most users need when they get to the homepage and how to organize information so that it’s more useful for people in a wide variety of situations.

I like how easy it is to find what you need on the front page. After that front page though, forget it! I think the design of the actual posts becomes really difficult to wade through, but I suppose a lot of that comes down to users who use 10 exclamation points in a row, or an unusual capitalization to draw attention to their post, etc. Under the circumstances though, I think craigslist is incredibly easy to use.

The barebones design also enhances the community driven, user generated aspect of craigslist. It’s like a web version of a bazaar or flea market, and as is the emphasis stays on what goods people are offering or looking for. I think if they changed the design to include a lot of graphics, or to make it more glamourous might detract from the DIY spirit of the site, which strikes me as central to craigslist.

Useit.com

The first time I saw this site I found it barely usable. In large part that is because I had no idea what it was, what sort of information I would find on it, and had never heard of Jakob Nielson. I imagine that if you know him and his work, you would look to it as a resource and the design wouldn’t be so off-putting.

What is most unpleasant about this site, for me, is that it’s not clear what it’s for or what users can expect to find on it. The divisions “Permanent Content” and “News” aren’t very helpful to me as a first time user, although I suppose they might be to the sites target users.

If I could redesign something I would put some sort of menu at the top to shed light on the contents of the site as a whole (beyond News/Permanent Content), to help the user feel like the content was more accessible. As it is it looks like a bunch of random links, the logic of why these links are up there and why some are permanent and some are news is not clear, but the random look of it doesn’t make me want to explore and find out.

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After reading Nielson’s article, I think he raises some very important points about speed and the role of design. While his reasons from 1995 are still valid concerns, I wonder if these days his site’s design has more to do with his status as “The web design guru that web designers love to hate”. At this point is that design more of a personal statement than a real example of optimal usability? I think there must be some way in which he could organize a text-only site that wouldn’t bloat download times but would still make information on the site more accessible.

Other sites:
One barebones site which I visit quite a bit and find easy to use is metafilter.com, the design feels seamless to me, even though it’s got a ton of users/contributors and thousands of posts. Despite that huge amount of information the organization of the site feels transparent and easy to navigate. Another site I just found that might fit that bill is astheria.com, although that might be cheating because it’s made by a UX focused web designer, and while I think it is fairly bare-bones the design feels very intuitive and comfortable, and I look forward to exploring it further.