Craigslist Housing

tl;dr

Through the DESIGNATION design boot camp I worked on a project to redesign Craigslist, specifically the housing section of the website. My team's goal was to enhance the usability of the site without changing the minimalistic feel.

Heuristic Evaluation

I conducted a heuristic evaluation to understand the usability gaps in the existing site. Some issues I noticed were inconsistencies in button and link formats and a lack of error prevention, especially when creating a posting. Visually, the design was text heavy and did not have clear call-to-actions.

User Groups and Experience Maps

The next step was to understand the current users of the site and their pain points. Through online research, my team identified specific types of people that currently use Craigslist and categorized them based on their goals and behaviors.

Our assumption was the most frequent users of the site were "The Value Seekers", or those looking for a good deal. To better understand that user type, we created experience maps for the selling and buying perspectives. This exercise helped the team identify critical "moments of truth" or decision points for each perspective and the corresponding areas of the site.

Wireframes

Having identified main usability issues and user goals, I created medium-fidelity wireframes using Illustrator. After several iterations we landed on the following options for the process of creating a posting.

Prototype and Usability Testing

The most insightful part of the project for me was usability testing. I built a prototype for the key interactions when creating a posting and tested the functionality with my peers.

We were able to gather valuable feedback around the usability and page interactions, which we incorporated back into the design. Our next steps would be to apply visual design to our wireframes and potentially test again for validation.