Craigslist.org is one of the most popular websites in the world, serving millions of monthly users by facilitating the exchange of goods and services through classified ad postings. Users in more than 700 cities worldwide can visit Craigslist to publish employment opportunities, participate in discussion forums, perform job searches and find housing locally.
Since Craigslist became a web-based service in the late 1990s, a typical city’s page looks roughly the same today as it did 15 years ago. Despite new and splashy design trends, the site maintains its ultra-basic, bare-bones design and continues to turn a profit even though the site doesn’t run banner ads or sell user data to third parties. In 2021, Craigslist generated an estimated $660 million in revenue, according to an AIM Group report.
User Data
Craigslist’s data come from users contributing classified advertisements to their local city’s site. Craigslist essentially operates as one site made up of smaller websites hosted on sub-domains of Craigslist.org. Each sub-domain corresponds to a specific location and features its own set of classifieds so that a user can publish or search for a posting where they live.
No matter which city page you access, the data are going to be mostly in the form of rich text and images. The data will include
- images
- addresses
- cities, states, countries, and continents
- ad titles
- prices
- addresses
- publish dates/times
- last updated dates
- post IDs
Categorization and Grouping
Data is structured within the following groupings, with very little variation from city to city, or country to country:
- Community
- Housing
- Jobs
- Services
- For Sale
- Discussion Forums
- Gigs
- Resumes
These groupings create the structure responsible for organizing the data and making it findable and usable within the site’s information architecture (IA).
Based on the posting type, there are very specific categories an ad can fall into. For example, if a user in the District of Columbia is posting a call for volunteers for a local food drive event, the user would select “Community” as the posting type and “Volunteers” as the category.
These guardrails are in place to assist users in making their content discoverable, though it’s not completely foolproof as certain terms can mean different things to different people.
Inputting Data
Once a user has classified their content by selecting the type and category, the user is then responsible for inputting data into fields such as:
- Posting Title
- City/Neighborhood/Postal Code
- Description
- Contact Information
Depending on the type of posting, there may be more specific data that can be included. For example, if someone is listing an apartment that’s available for rent (as seen in the image above), that form is going to look different than the form someone would use to post a job opportunity. The specific fields that appear in the “posting details” section are unique to that type of listing and will be critical to the findability of the post.
Populating data and making selections in the fields such as “pets ok,” “housing type,” and “rent per square foot” will allow users searching by those specific parameters to find applicable listings.
Users will tend to search for housing based on their price range and will filter their results to indicate their desired number of bedrooms and preferences for listings with a washer and dryer, air conditioner, and more. In order for a user’s post to come up in the correct search results, the user needs to complete those fields in the form. It wouldn’t be enough to include that information in the description alone.
Structure and Taxonomies
All classified ad postings have a similar display structure. There’s a title, description, map area with approximate location, and images if the user chose to include any. Where your listing appears is determined by the “type” and “category” the user selected when creating the posting.
Taxonomy and Keywords
Craigslist’s taxonomy consists of the nouns that we discussed earlier: Community, Housing, Jobs, Services, For Sale, Discussion Forums, Gigs, and Resumes, as well as an exhaustive list of subcategories which contain terms like “boat parts,” “missed connections,” and “vacation rentals” which can only make sense to the user within those main categorical containers.
The taxonomy (categories and subcategories) are critical to making content findable and discoverable. Without it, there would be no way for users to find anything or sort and filter through postings, since the website offers very little in terms of navigation.
Filtering and Sorting
At the community-level pages, there’s a limited hierarchy, which causes a user to rely on filtering and sorting within the interior search pages to find what they are looking for.
There’s a robust offering of filters on search pages by type and category so that users may limit the number of postings that appear in search results to only the ones that contain the data they’re specifying. Users have the ability to get very granular in their searches and can use features like filter buttons that span the top of search pages to filter their results further and see what filters they have selected.
The filter buttons pictured below allow a user to narrow down their search results for apartments to only those with at least two bedrooms and which allow cats.
Sorting is also useful when searching Craigslist. Search results sorting allows users to sort by newest or oldest listings, as well as by price. That’s why it’s important that users posting to Craigslist specify their desired pricing within the pricing details.
User Experience
There are so many people throughout the world using Craigslist to find and post classifieds. In fact, and many of them are repeat users. What Craigslist lacks visually, they make up for in predictability since so many of its users are accustomed to doing things a certain way and have been for years. Any sweeping changes to the UX would impact users across the world and likely cause confusion and abandonment.
Users can come to the site and find where to create a posting with ease and the prompts for creating a post are easy to follow. It’s also nice that a user has the option to easily change the language of the site to meet their unique needs and when they create their post, the form changes to the selected language as well.
There’s been hardly any improvements made to the user experience in 25 years and it’s clear that they aren’t trying to keep up with competitors like Facebook Marketplace, for example. The site is simple and helps people get what they need done quickly.
One very uncommon practice that is part of Craigslist’s policy to this day is that users can post anonymously and that the site is completely open. While users have the option to create an account and log in, the logged-in user will still have the same experience as someone who is not logged in.
There are some benefits to creating an account, such as easy access to:
- Unpublished drafts
- Saved searches
- Your posted ads
However, unless you’re constantly posting classified to the site, there isn’t much of an incentive to create an account or log in.
According to Craigslist’s “What’s New” page, “there are always changes and improvements happening.” Some notable UX improvements include
- homepage icons across the homepage for “add posting,” “my account,” and “favorites”
- a new bar chart to see the range of prices and average price for items in a search
- and an info button tool tip that users can hover over for tips for searching.
Innovations
From its start in 1995 as Craig Newmark’s email to friends about San Francisco Bay Area happenings to today, Craigslist has become the biggest market for classified ads on the Internet, but that isn’t without any repercussions.
Over the years Craigslist has come under fire for facilitating prostitution, child sex trafficking, and scamming. The company has had to eliminate its “personals” section in the U.S. in 2018 after Congress passed the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, meant to crack down on sex trafficking of children. Though it maintains its “missed connections” section.
Craigslist provides some suggestions to users for avoiding scams, such as its advice to “deal locally, face-to-face” and offers more information about avoiding scams on its website.
Doing what its always done has worked for the company this long, however if Craigslist wants to remain relevant and attract new users, it would benefit from some innovations to its base process, such as adding a global navigation menu, creating a more appealing design, and updating some of its policies to help keep people safe and build (and rebuild) trust among users.