craigslist
overview
Craigslist is an online marketplace that provides a platform for users to sell, purchase, and exchange products and services.
This project was created during a 3 day design sprint strictly focusing on the visual design of the homepage and user’s profile page of the desktop website.
role
ux designer
user research, design strategy, visual design, wireframing, prototyping
what’s the problem?
Concluding my research I came to the understanding that:
the current iteration of the desktop application is outdate visually and functionally.
there is a large absence of hierarchy, organization, and clear typography.
Although this redesign was mainly focused on visual improvements, I still wanted to conduct some research in order to understand the current state of the website and competitors were doing to be successful.
In order to gain this insight I proceed with
heuristic evaluations
competitive analysis
From these evaluations and analyses I was able to find some core issues of the website. Some of these issues consisted of lack of satisfaction, memorability, and efficiency when a user would navigate through the website.
Through this realization combined with the observation of other competitors such as Amazon, Facebook Marketplace, and eBay I decided that the main aspects of the design that I would focus on would be to improve the hierarchy, navigation, and categorization of the pages through out of the website.
research
After gaining an understanding of the underlying issues, I began to sketch potential layouts for the redesign.
Here are some of the sketches that I drew up for new potential layouts and designs.
with these layouts as a foundation, I wanted to transfer these ideas into a digital format. To this I moved on to Figma where I created some layouts and low-fidelity wire frames based on the sketches.
Here are some of the layouts I created
The three layouts above were the original layouts that came after the research and sketching. Although I did feel good about the format and placement of all the features, the design felt more of a online store rather than a online marketplace where users could post, buy, and sell products and services.
In order to fix this I created the layout below which I knew from my competitive analysis would bring a marketplace feel.
design process
Conduct usability tests to gain user insight on the redesign of the website.
Make a mobile friendly version of the website as some users may prefer to use different devices.
Continue to iterate, test, and improve on the design based on user feed back and potential missed pain points.
next steps
From this project I learned how to dissect an existing website and see what can be improved and what needs to be completely changed. I found heuristic evaluations, competitive analysis, and comparative analysis to be very helpful in this type of project as it helps distinguish the good and bad traits when designing a user friendly interface.