Recently Wired magazine asked a group of designerz to reenvision Craigslist. According to Wired, “Visitors arriving at craigslist are confronted by a confusing homepage cluttered with links most people will never click on. Overall, the user interface is in dire need of an organizing principle that guides you to the details you seek while filtering out extraneous information.”
The design above was submitted by a team from the NY Times led by Khoi Vinh (I think — ironically, the Wired page is a little confusing and hard to follow). According to Vinh, “It feels more open, more nimble,” than the existing site.
I believe the weird little pointer thingees are not part of the design but were added by Wired to highlight elements of the design. Probably their colored circles are intended to signal something — but what?
The main functional difference appears to be that when you click on a section it opens within a window on the page rather than taking you to a new page.
All in all, the proposed redesign seems a reasonable piece of work. But I wonder how it would be received by the Craigslist community.
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UPDATE: Khoi Vinh discusses the redesign on his blog.
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