[HN Gopher] Give It the Craigslist Test
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Give It the Craigslist Test
Author : promiseofbeans
Score : 223 points
Date : 2023-05-05 08:48 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ericaheinz.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ericaheinz.com)
| bravura wrote:
| Aside: Is there a "WIP" looking theme for bootstrap? Something
| purposefully minimal / rough-around-the-edges / handwritten?
| echelon wrote:
| Plenty of people use HN.
|
| Lots of folks prefer "Old Reddit".
|
| I'm continually reminded of how 4chan is still a thing.
|
| We admire bare bones web design, spartan blogs, and archeological
| finds from the 90's web that are still around.
|
| You don't need a design team to build something useful that
| people will consume.
| lipoid_ecole wrote:
| Old reddit loads faster and has higher information density. The
| New design is form over function.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Very niche, but my least favorite web re-design was the used
| camera retailer KEH.com (this was probably at least a decade
| ago). They went from a craigslist style listing (text dense,
| easy to drill down to any level from one page: Nikon Manual
| Focus ->Fixed length lenses->Nikon Brand || other brand. I
| think it was one or two clicks to get to a list of stock for a
| given category) to a regular e-commerce style page. Takes much
| longer to get to a nice looking page with less info and
| products displayed.
|
| FWIW I haven't bought any gear from them since that happened,
| and they used to be my first stop for used equipment.
|
| I think when you are selling to a buyer that knows what they
| want, its best to stick to a simpler information dense
| interface (Digikey, McMaster-Carr, etc.). I think a lot of
| websites try to "chase the trend" and look like Amazon, or
| whatever, without realizing that it is much harder to get that
| right than it is to get an ugly page right.
| webmobdev wrote:
| Functionality always trumps jazzy designs. (E.g. Craigslist vs
| olx.in).
| karaterobot wrote:
| Specifically, I prefer Old Reddit because it shows me all the
| comments in the thread, rather than just some of them, plus a
| completely different thread I didn't click on. The visual
| design is a push for me.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Reddit says something funny about this test, I'm not sure what,
| though.
|
| Old Reddit is of course so much better. I guess "new" Reddit is
| shitty either due to the requirements of monetization, or maybe
| second-system syndrome.
|
| I think the Craigslist test is good, but it is interesting to
| note that the first, thrown together interface could possibly
| provide a "false positive," in the sense that the first
| implementation could have the advantages of not expecting to be
| monetized yet, and not having been infected too much by current
| design fads.
| criley2 wrote:
| >Lots of folks prefer "Old Reddit".
|
| Moderators can see the traffic breakdown and old reddit traffic
| hovers around 5-10% of total traffic depending on community.
|
| I think the "loud minority" is a concept that is very very
| applicable here.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| New Reddit unbelievably enough still hasn't fixed the bug
| where it crashes if you paste text in the input. Whoever is
| using it is sure not overlapping with the segment that ever
| participates in any sort of discussion on desktop.
|
| ... and also clearly none of the reddit development team is
| using it either. How else would they miss a breaking bug for
| five years?! It's not like inputting text is a niche feature.
| echelon wrote:
| Probably incredibly subreddit dependent.
|
| I think it speaks volumes that Old Reddit hasn't been
| removed. Even the maintenance burden of continually
| supporting it is outweighed by its value.
| doublepg23 wrote:
| They announced new API terms and will be charging for
| access. I think such a bold move means the demise of
| old.reddit.com is closer than ever.
| chayesfss wrote:
| [dead]
| cloverich wrote:
| While im skeptical old reddit would be overall more popular,
| its not valid to look at traffic. You have to know what old
| reddit is to even get there -- few do. The fact that its up
| to 10% is frankly astonishingly high imo.
| qgin wrote:
| 10% of users intentionally choosing anything besides a
| default is crazy high
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| ...but that may be the loud minority who posts the content
| that attracts all the New Reddit users.
| myself248 wrote:
| They load faster, too.
|
| I'm presently grocery-shopping in another tab, and I am
| continually amazed at what a terrible UX I put up with. Compare
| any grocery website to McMaster-Carr and it's not even 10x,
| it's like 100x worse. But I give them my business because the
| competition is actually even worse.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| There must be something about grocery sites that makes them
| so awful. I've even submitted feedback to a delivery service
| that I used to use with comments like
|
| "enabling a filter for meat shows recommended items from
| other categories above the meat products"
|
| "clicking on page 2 of results resets all filters"
|
| "searching for item X returns a list of results that does not
| contain it, but navigation shows it clearly exists"
|
| etc.
|
| How can it be so bad??
| toast0 wrote:
| > "clicking on page 2 of results resets all filters"
|
| My favorite is when you add a filter when you're on page 2
| and now you're on page 2 of the filtered results.
| tuyenhx wrote:
| Old reddit has less bugs too. First time, using reddit, I used
| the new version. But my internet connection was too bad, this
| caused a lot of problems with the new version.
|
| When I knew about the old version, I tried. And wow, almost
| every bugs I had with the new one went away. Faster load too.
| webmobdev wrote:
| This is really good advise. When I started out, one of the best
| advise I got as a web designer was to always ask new clients to
| focus on the content. I had to repeatedly emphasise to the
| clients who got distracted with beautiful templates or wanted
| flash-bang animated, multimedia on their site that you need to
| focus on specific objectives, with content to match this, and my
| job as designer was to present the content to achieve these
| goals. But no, the clients were still obsessed with wanting a _"
| banner that showed ripples in water when a drop falls on it_" ...
| indymike wrote:
| When I onboard a new designer, I usually talk with them about
| Craig's List, Amazon versus "beautiful" UI. The point is exactly
| the last line of this article:
|
| "Focus on content and functionality when you're designing new
| products; that's the validation that will build a business."
|
| Now I'm going to add this article to required reading for new
| engineering team members.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| As someone who is still scared of CSS and HTML, all I can say is:
| my time has come.
| gwd wrote:
| Unfortunately, the advice was to focus on the important user
| interactions. Actually designing a good user interaction is a
| skill that most developers (including myself) just don't have.
| I can tell that there's something wrong, but I can't really
| tell how to fix it.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| That comes with practice. Use the fewest built-in controls
| for an interaction, then try it out. You'll probably need to
| tweak it: add/remove labels, add a control, line breaks, etc.
|
| There's no magic gene for this, it's just the willingness and
| ability to navigate a large design space.
| neon_electro wrote:
| You can do it!
| sneed_chucker wrote:
| Tangential, and probably preaching to the choir here, but I
| really hate the modern web design trends.
|
| I check up on the websites of current and former employers, and
| they've basically all turned into this same template where all
| the text is vague and lofty while telling you nothing about the
| company or service("CloudProduct from Tech Corp is the best way
| to transform your data operations for next generation
| workloads"), the graphics are all flat corporate Memphis or stock
| images (no screenshots or demo videos of the actual product), and
| the pages all do that annoying thing where effects/elements
| appear and disappear as you scroll down the page.
|
| I don't know, maybe this is the sort of thing that works on
| product/marketing people but to me it just seems like pointless
| fluff and makes me not want to look any deeper into the company
| or product.
| codetrotter wrote:
| In this regard I like the front page of https://www.kraken.com/
| a lot.
|
| > Buy bitcoin & crypto
|
| > Sign up today to easily buy 200+ cryptocurrencies. Get
| started in minutes with as little as $10.
|
| > Buy crypto with $10
|
| It is instantly clear what service Kraken offers.
| Eumenes wrote:
| Agreed, nice and simple, minus the Corporate Memphis art
| style.
| theturtle32 wrote:
| Omg yes!! I HATE this current design trend. It makes it
| EXTREMELY difficult to learn anything useful without, god
| forbid, talking to a sales rep, which is the absolute LAST
| thing I want to do in discovery. I automatically write off
| companies like this right out of the gate and move on. I assume
| that when I do talk to their sales people, they will paint a
| misleadingly rosy picture that doesn't match the reality of
| what we get after the contract is signed.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| With these I wonder if the sites are there for investors while
| real customers are acquired through the sales teams.
| tgv wrote:
| They copy each other (and frankly, so do we). This style is
| their common idea of "professional image". Since many companies
| have siloed off marketing, they have no real understanding of
| what's going on in the rest of the company. At least, that's
| how I see it.
| 55555 wrote:
| I'm a lazy guy, so when I _first_ validate a business opportunity
| for product-market fit, I do a purposefully bad job. If a good
| job is required, the opportunity isn't good enough.
| k__ wrote:
| This resonates with me.
|
| I'm a developer and writer, not a designer.
|
| I'm a bottom up kind of guy, I want to get the things work
| correctly, without building mockups or a strategy first.
| Iterative creations, you know?
|
| Obviously, non-technical people have to do it the other way
| around, so most resources you find online focus on the top down
| approach.
| dougSF70 wrote:
| Totally agree, substance over style.
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| Garbage. People pick products all the time, based purely on how
| the presentation makes them feel. They buy crap products all the
| time based on aspirational signals. People are people; this is
| selling a book; and most of the comments seem to just
| reveal/confirm a success bias (just 'cuz) or a failure bias (just
| 'cuz) with absolutely no evidence.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| Similar to this: I raised a seed round with a deck that was
| (deliberately) just black Times New Roman text on a white
| background, plus a few screenshots. The product was also
| deliberately simple and rough around the edges.
|
| I stole an idea from Joel Spolskey and made beta features in the
| app have graphics that were literally drawn in crayon, to make it
| clear they were unfinished and to make it easy to test changes.
|
| Investors liked the deck. It made it clear that what mattered was
| the content, not the presentation.
| jjeaff wrote:
| I wonder what percentage of investors might actually draw the
| conclusion that while you may have a great product, you might
| be bad at marketing it?
|
| Because, while lots of engineers would like to think that the
| success of a product is due to the tech and features, the
| reality is that good market can make a crap product successful
| a lot more often than a good product can overcome bad marketing
| and presentation. Craigslist seems to be an exception rather
| than the rule.
| blululu wrote:
| It might have been great marketing for the same sort of
| counter signaling as the Mark Zuckerberg hoodie. "A man who
| can dress that poorly must be really good". Craigslist is an
| outlier in many ways. The most significant is that they did
| not raise huge venture rounds so they have never been
| existentially committed to fulfilling an investor's opinion
| of what a top 25 website should be.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Similar to this: consistently be a total weirdo and end up with
| a girl that actually likes you.
|
| (Don't ask me how I know)
| nonethewiser wrote:
| This is a tangent, but perhaps similar to what you are
| saying.
|
| Dare to stand out. Even if it's unpopular and immediately
| pushes away 90% of people. Your goal when dating is not to
| make everyone like you. It's to find one person that loves
| you.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| The real "be yourself" advice means "be true to yourself."
|
| Do be real about who you are and what you care about
| (innate to you), don't be rude and poorly prepared (not
| innate to you).
| hluska wrote:
| This chain of messages was unexpected but filled with
| great info. Good advice - thanks for sharing.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| > I stole an idea from Joel Spolskey and made beta features in
| the app have graphics that were literally drawn in crayon
|
| As a programmer I refuse to waste any cycles on "slightly
| better than shit programmer art".
|
| Nope. Colors are magenta, font is Arial, and 3D models are all
| teapots. It serves two purposes. It signals this is genuinely
| temp and forces artist/designers to update it.
|
| The danger of making it better is it's good enough for mocks,
| shouldn't ship, but ships because no one took the time to
| update.
| kazinator wrote:
| The real Craigslist Test: "would people still love it if it
| looked like Craiglist, and then took RSS away to spite them, like
| Craigslist".
| kmoser wrote:
| Proving once again that the KISS principle always applies.
| vecplane wrote:
| Is this describing the practice of 'grayboxing' in design?
| karaterobot wrote:
| Yeah, or wireframing, or low-fidelity prototyping. Definitely
| not new advice, but I guess it'll be somebody's first exposure
| to the idea, so they'll learn a new thing today.
| ec109685 wrote:
| That example of Maybe.co and their pivot was illustrative of form
| over function.
|
| However, I can't see how their new approach will be successful
| either: https://twitter.com/Shpigford/status/1645422615279050758
|
| Why won't existing companies that already have the users and
| existing connections fast follow anything the startup does? They
| are competing head on with billion dollar companies and adding a
| chat interface and video conferencing as the differentiation.
|
| They have to do all the hard parts to onboard users, convince
| them to connect with their financial institutions, establish
| trust with financial recommendations, build a two sided
| marketplace with financial advisors, yet Mint or wealth front or
| many other companies could spend six months and have a better
| product out in the market with an established user base and way
| of making money.
|
| Why are investors excited by this pivot?
| yawnr wrote:
| The reality is more likely that because they had almost zero
| traction, they saw all the AI hype and decided to rework the
| whole product to call ChatGPT APIs to try to capitalize on the
| wave.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if it worked in getting more money from
| investors because they can call themselves an AI company now!
| balderdash wrote:
| I'd go a step further and say that none of these types of
| products actually do the hard work that people would be willing
| to pay for. E.g. most of these statistics are wrong (net worth
| increased x% because I rolled over my IRA, dividend
| reinvestments treated improperly, basis accounted for the wrong
| way, etc)
| calderwoodra wrote:
| Personal finance apps are tarpit ideas.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMIawSAygO4
| indymike wrote:
| > Why won't existing companies that already have the users and
| existing connections fast follow anything the startup does?
|
| In this case, I think the founders realized that by focusing on
| UI and data engineering, they were not focused on the right
| things: what kind of digital financial assistant is worth
| paying for?
|
| Finally, the question, "why won't big existing player come eat
| your lunch?" directs conversation away from opportunity.
| Products like maybe.co often end up being acquired by big,
| existing players because huge companies often struggle with
| invention and ideation, and it's often easier to deploy money
| to buy the kernel of a great product than what happens in most
| large, risk-adverse companies when innovation requires internal
| failure after internal failure before success.
|
| > Why are investors excited by this pivot?
|
| I'm not an investor in maybe.co, but I'm much more interested
| in what they are doing now that they aren't focused on pretty
| UI. They have a long way to go before they have something, but
| as they say, keep a good team on the field long enough... and
| good things happen.
| leobg wrote:
| Hacker News is actually another great example of this concept. If
| you plotted the appearance vs. usefulness ratio for 1,000
| websites, HN would be one of the crazy outliers.
|
| Good one! Thanks for posting this.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Outlier in which direction though?
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I feel like human raters at Google ruined my SEO after looking
| at the graphic design of my website :(
|
| Not only is ranking on appearance faster than usefulness, a
| rater can confidently do that because their other raters will
| do the same.
|
| "Tight inter-rater variability" = confidence in rating for some
| reason, as opposed to consistency in bias.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| I wonder if there's something generally true about
| bureaucracies in that: do they all eventually come to value
| precision over accuracy?
|
| Given how bureaucrats often travel in large packs and seem to
| find safety in numbers, maybe it's unsurprising that they
| would value agreeing with each other over finding the truth.
|
| I had no idea the SEO world had its own bureaucracies of
| human web-site raters, though. I guess it makes sense that
| lots of large companies would invest in creating that sort of
| thing. :(
| mlhpdx wrote:
| That's what the Black-Scholes equation does: variation is
| risk. It's manifest everywhere.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| For about a decade now I've been building robotics software UIs
| in a context where we don't have a design team (internal
| software, tech savvy users, start-up pace). One of the things
| I've found to work so consistently well is the kind of test
| shared in this article. I regularly say, "to learn what we don't
| yet know about the problem space" when asked about why I like
| shipping things ASAP and then worrying about design
| characteristics later.
|
| I'm convinced that design _regularly_ impacts a feature 's
| usefulness, but is _rarely_ necessary to make it useful at all.
| That is: it 's important but not required.
|
| Of course this is for a captive audience. For something you're
| trying to sell, window dressing can matter.
| bradgessler wrote:
| I took this approach for https://legiblenews.com/ and
| https://www.thingybase.com/. The art on Thingybase is all poorly
| drawn stick figures that I sketched out on my iPad.
|
| Not only do I recommend doing this when building apps or websites
| initially, but I recommend it for the final product. It ends up
| being much faster, easier to maintain, easier for people to read,
| and more accessible.
|
| I have another app in the works that's using https://picocss.com/
| with basically no CSS. It's great not having to think too much
| about design elements and focus on only the most important bits
| of the application.
| s1k3s wrote:
| Minimalism for the sake of minimalism is just as bad as the
| concept described in the article. For example I find your blog
| very easy to read but very hard to navigate. I don't understand
| its structure, I can't find any menus and I don't know when I'm
| at the end of "something".
| bradgessler wrote:
| Glad it's easy to read! That's exactly what it's optimized
| for. There's no real structure to the site, hence no menus
| and nothing really to navigate to.
|
| I agree minimalism for the sake of minimalism is bad design--
| I don't advocate for that. What I do advocate for is
| minimalism for the sake of accessibility, ease of
| maintenance, improved readability, etc. I'm also not
| categorically opposed to adding this stuff if needed. What I
| find is that most of the time its not a great starting point.
| woozyolliew wrote:
| Bookmarking Legible News! I have been surviving on
| https://lite.cnn.com, https://text.npr.org/, and
| http://68k.news/, but your site is much easier on the eye, so
| will be taking it for a spin.
| welovetacos wrote:
| If you're into sports also check out
| https://plaintextsports.com
|
| Amazingly well done
| gpt5 wrote:
| Craigslist is an example of the strength of network effects. It's
| succeeding despite its user hostile design because it has no
| incentive to change.
|
| Using it as an example for MVP of your design is ludicrous.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Hmm, first-mover advantage maybe, but there's no real "network
| effect" I can see - are all my friends on CL? How would I even
| know? Craigslist is heroically ugly, but I wouldn't call that
| "user hostile" - the only obvious dysfunction I can see are the
| usual gaming of listings a la eBay etc., from local car
| dealerships spamming keywords, etc.
| toast0 wrote:
| Network effects in a marketplace are clear. Buyers go where
| the sellers are, sellers go where the buyers are, etc.
|
| Craigslist networking is mostly local, so some places there's
| not much in the way of listings (for jobs, services,
| marketplace, etc) and some places only one category is
| popular and some places you would find your job, your
| apartment, your furniture, and before personals went away,
| maybe your spouse.
| chomp wrote:
| This is definitely a take. Can you explain the network effects
| and user hostility?
| SPBS wrote:
| 1. Craigslist is only used as an example. It could have been
| any other minimalist website. The post is not calling to
| imitate Craigslist because it is successful, it is calling to
| use minimal design (like Craigslist) for your MVP because if it
| has any real value-add, your users will love it anyway.
|
| 2. Like others have said, Craigslist's design is _not_ user
| hostile.
| bityard wrote:
| I've used Craigslist for, what, decades and I never found it to
| be user-hostile. If I owned it, I would probably make a few
| tweaks here and there but I have no trouble at all placing an
| ad or browsing the listings. It's a very honest design and I
| think that speaks to people.
|
| Contrast that to the thing that is replacing it: Facebook
| marketplace. It's beautiful, but, the barrier to entry is high,
| there is no practical way to browse specific categories, search
| shows tons of irrelevant results, there is no way to set up
| keyword or category alerts, and it's riddled with scams and
| flakes. The entire object of FB is not to get anything done,
| it's to keep you scrolling for as long as possible.
| derefr wrote:
| What's user-hostile about Craigslist's design? Do you think
| Windows 95 UX is user-hostile too? Many people would say that
| having a strict adherence to universal UI conventions such that
| "your buttons always look like buttons" (Windows 95) or "your
| links always look like links, and your form inputs always look
| like form inputs" (Craigslist) is _more_ usable.
|
| (Also, if you think Craigslist "has no incentive to change",
| you probably haven't used it in a while. It was rebuilt -- 5+
| years ago now! -- as a modern HTML5 website that only vaguely
| resembles its previous HTML4 minimal-CSS no-JS approach. But
| even that old design was extremely _usable_.)
| giantrobot wrote:
| In what way is Craigslist "user hostile"? Craigslist pages are
| information dense but hardly hostile. They don't waste 75% of
| the screen on whitespace. That's not hostile.
| spikey_sanju wrote:
| Sure, I agree. I simplified my SaaS product SticAI.com and
| removed any unnecessary features to make it work better. This
| reduced any difficulties for users. I did the same thing for my
| open source portfolio website spikeysanju.com, where I made sure
| that users could consume the content without any distractions.
| That was the main goal for both projects.
| swalling wrote:
| The accompanying practice here, which you can really do on any
| level of design fidelity from wireframes to a pixel perfect
| finished product, is a squint test. Literally squint your eyes
| and blur your vision a bit. Are the major components of a design
| still distinct and discernible or not?
|
| My favorite way to do this is to simply take my glasses off and
| look at something. Craigslist itself is a pretty bonkers design
| on its face, but despite being insanely busy, the major
| organizing blocks of the design still stand out to me and are
| scannable even when I can't read the full text.
| cyberax wrote:
| Also.
|
| PLEASE USE LARGER FONTS.
|
| One thing I hate about modern design is the use of microscopic
| fonts with giant margins around them. Often with poor contrast.
|
| The whole "material UI" is built like this.
| orhmeh09 wrote:
| Really? I don't like modern design or material UI at all, and
| one of the things I most dislike is huuuge fonts. I apply
| custom CSS to reduce them to 10-12 pt where 16-24 pt seem
| common now.
| cyberax wrote:
| Yes. Look at the GMail UI for example, or Google Groups:
| https://groups.google.com/g/golang-dev (BTW, its UI designer
| needs to be fired and banned from working on UI design for
| life).
|
| There are large empty margins around each line. That grow if
| you try to increase the scale. If these margins were
| decreased, you could have seen more information on one
| screen.
| ex3ndr wrote:
| Well, AirBNB wouldn't pass this test in early days since they
| mostly started to grow after starting making professional photos
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I always felt like Craigslist pre-validated AirBNB as a
| business. Short-term rooms for rent was already a popular
| Craigslist section. AirBNB took that and (1) added payment, (2)
| parametric searching and (3) better profiles.
|
| Craigslist is/was largely where things get listed that don't
| have a specialized site that fulfills those at least 2 of
| those. E.g. etsy, ebay, stubhub, online dating, rideshares,
| gigs
|
| https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/craigslist-...
|
| Image from above link:
| https://i.insider.com/4dd4d1cf4bd7c8c90f000000
| turnsout wrote:
| Speaking as a design consultant who specializes in software: this
| is good advice! Use the lowest fidelity possible until you figure
| out what your product is and who it's for. Once you know that, it
| will give you a clear direction for the visuals and interactions.
| draw_down wrote:
| [dead]
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