As I was assigned a group with 3 other UX research students, we performed extensive research before redesigning the website. We designed an initial survey that included screening questions, identified our personas, conducted a card sort, and tested users with scenarios.
Our screening questions and initial survey influenced our personas. The personas then influenced the users we selected for testing scenarios. Our requirements were that they needed to be college students between the ages of 22-27, enrolled in college (or college equivalent), and living in Arizona.
Persona #1: Julia – 22 year old Arizona State University undergraduate student
Persona #2: Jonathan – 27 year old Arizona State University graduate student
The card sorting findings lead to a recommended site navigation map. This diagram is inspired not only by card grouping but also placement/order. As events was the first category selected, I chose to make that into its own calendar section in my community directory.
The first testing scenario shows the user the for sale portion of Craigslist and the other two scenarios focus on community, which is much more diverse than the for sale pages.
My homepage re-design decisions were partially influenced by the results of my group's user testing. Other parts were influenced by the user testing objectives.
In my personal user tests, both of my users mentioned how they wished dark mode existed as an option on the site. With this information, I made a big part of my re-design focused on the "enabled" dark mode toggle. Following users' typical F-shaped scanning pattern, I made dark mode the first option visible in the upper left corner of the page, just beneath the header.
Another critique that was mentioned was how FAQs were difficult to find. Having the FAQs on the homepage made it so that they could be accessed easily and help to navigate the site more fluidly.
One of the objectives of the user testing was to determine if the re-design should be focused on the community or for sale aspects of Craigslist. Personally, I felt that omitting one or the other would exclude many of Craigslist's existing users. With this in mind, I chose to make my homepage very simplified – giving the user a choice for which section they'd like to use. Both buttons lead to their respective directory pages.
Currently, a community directory page doesn't exist in this format on the website. My users were intrigued by the event calendar in my user testing but didn't enjoy the placement or functionality. I decided that it would be effective to keep the calendar feature but also add a search bar where users could look up key words for events they would like to attend.
The results of the card sorting proved that users appreciated having less categories to choose from – and many categories have overlap and room to be combined. Some sections of Craigslist have become borderline obsolete at this point. I completely removed the forum boards off of the website since hardly any users were posting there and most of it was inappropriate or offensive content.
In the future, I would love to eventually add more to the community directory and design the pages that the category buttons lead to. I enjoy the idea of making the pages unique in how they're displayed rather than them having the same format similar to how Craigslist currently operates.
