Craigslist is a project that focused on redesigning the platform from a traditional website into a modern mobile app. As the final project of my master's degree in Product Design, this year-long challenge aimed to enhance the purchasing experience on Craigslist, which has seen minimal updates over the years. Through a comprehensive UX process, our goal was to create a sleek, intuitive platform that meets the evolving needs of today’s users.

Timeline: 1 year as a master's degree project

Redesign the Craigslist website according to the users' needs to increase the number of new users and the customer satisfaction score.

Challenge

Objectives

  • Redesign the app based on user insights and perceptions.

  • Create a fresh user experience to aid in making better purchasing decisions.

  • Fix all the design problems the website has and make it more intuitive.

We started inspecting the usability of Craigslist with the heuristic evaluation. We found out that the principal aspect is that it doesn’t show any error prevention or state to recover from it. Furthermore, it has numerous elements that make the user think more, it looks saturated and for that reason, it’s confusing.

Research

Heuristic Evaluation

Research

We made six interviews with people that liked to buy second—handed products online. We needed to understand their mental models and their perspectives or motivations.

Insights

  • Communication was the key for them to decide whether to buy or not.

  • They appreciate multimedia files (videos, GIFs…) of the products where they can see it in detail and be more confident with the sale.‍

We created two personas:

  • Mateo, who is very passionate about technology. He likes to collect or resell technological objects. He needs to make sure the product is the same that the seller shows, and it has the best price for him.

  • Cata, who is very artistic. She buys these products because they are cheaper and let her improve her abilities. She likes to speak with the seller so she can guarantee the product of the state.

Definition

To ideate our solution, we made a content briefing to discover the best way to communicate with users and take them until the last stage of the purchases.

We decided to:

  • Allow the users to see all the content before login in to catch their attention first.

  • Put the contact button close to the “buy” button, so users can see it easily in case they have any questions.

  • Include 360° photos, so users could see the product in all the angles.

  • Make the purchase process on different screens to not overload the user.

Ideation

It was time to start sketching. We decided to make a mobile app because most of our users tend to use more their cell phones to make purchases.

‍Then we made the low-fidelity sketches with Miro. With Figma, we created the style guide (colors, type fonts, grids…).

‍And finally, designed the high-fidelity prototype. You can see the video on the left side.

Prototyping

Contact me to see the prototype in Figma, or visit my Behance profile to preview the UI Kit and some of the design.

To make the needed iterations, we made UX testing with 6 people.

We scheduled a short interview at first. Then, we put a context so they could make the task, and in the end, we talked about all the experiences with the prototype.

We had great reviews, during the test they didn’t make many mistakes and completed the task. But, we determined some points of improvement.

Testing

After all, we can say that we achieved the goal of the project: 
Redesign Craigslist according to the user's needs.

  • We solved the problem of distrust that users had by unifying the multimedia in the app.

  • We made the communication accessible by putting contact buttons on strategic screens.

  • We made a modern design that is more appealing to users.

Conclusion

Next steps

We took the four most important points of improvement and put them in a graphic to see the impact on the company.

Then, we noticed the urgent tasks we needed to discuss with them.

  • Developing the 360° image for the product state verification.

  • We need to consider putting a chat instead of directing users to WhatsApp.

  • Putting a bigger payment gateway to have more options for the users.

See more proyects!