Redesigning Craigslist’s Homepage & “Housing Wanted” — a UX Case Study

Helping those seeking their next housing opportunity with a fun, fresh, and useful experience.

Craigslist has been existing and thriving on the web since it’s creation. While some people have preconcieved notions about the site being a hotspot for housing scams, others consistently come back because they’ve been able to find great housing and roommate opportunities.

For this project, I decided to create an experience focused on helping future rental tenants find their perfect housing fit in a new space.

So, how might we help a future rental tenant better narrow down their ideal search results on Craigslist?

When I started this project, there were a few ideas for solutions that were top of mind:

• Rebrand/ UI elements: I want to make the website look fresh, attractive and friendly- all while keeping the familiar yet defining Craigslist staples (aka, their classic Times New Roman logo and deep purple color hues).
• Navigate & Custom Search: Another priority is to make it more seamless for users to navigate, search, and access more applicable postings. A solution would be to create an assessment flow that outputs more custom, accurate listing results.
• *Bonus* Homepage Additions— “Best of” & “Missed Connections”: I’ll consider building out these experiences a bit more in the future, but for now, I’d love to bring these two items more to the forefront on the landing page. For those of you who don’t know, these are epic, hilarious pages that make Craigslist truly unique. After all, there is an entire book solely dedicated to the most hilarious, heartfelt, and raunchy listings.

Initial Research

Going into interviews, I wanted to better understand how successful users feel when using Craigslist compared to other housing sites.

Tech Savviness: Interviewees self-identified themselves on a 1–10 scale (1 = excessively struggles with novel and repeated experiences across hardware/ software tecnology, 10 = the most technically skilled with novel and repeated experiences across hardware/ software technology ). Average score = 5.8.

Here were some of the key starter questions asked, with follow-up questions based on the topic:

Introductory: What are you considering as essential living requirements in your next rental opportunity? Which sites or apps have you used to find your next rental opportunity? Why do you use [product name(s)]?

Current Product Usage: When was the last time you visited Craigslist? How often do you visit the site, and on what device usually? What was the goal of your visit?

Conversion: What living wants and needs are unique/important to you?How do you ensure that your key living wants and needs in your next place are included in your search results?”

Of course, where-needed to gather more actionable insights, probing ensued.

Usability: I assigned each interviewee this goal: Find your ideal rental based on your process to sort and filter results. “Please open your laptop and launch Craigslist on your preferred web browser. What can you do here once you’ve clicked on the “Housing” section? When you hover and click on items on this page, what can you do? What do you feel is missing to meet your goal?

Research Findings

1. Housing type and location are the important drivers of a housing search, however an individual’s decision on housing ultimately is determine by budget. When budget is a primary driver in the housing search, users are often open to a wider variety of housing options.

2. With a wider variety of factors influencing the housing search, modern rental finding applications do not accurately address users needs, putting to heavy of an emphasis on a small set of factors. Users ofter have to adjust their sort and filter options several times to determine the proper query. While not rendering the search impossible, these repeated adjustments (2–5 times per visit on average), significantly decreases the user experience.

3. To better address an apartment hunter’s needs, we must consider users that are willing to live further out from the city, if it means they can receive more valuable and accessible amenities. User’s may be looking for a place that is pet-friendly, non-smoking, has wheelchair access/ elevators, and has reasonable parking and laundry options for the monthly budget. Several users responded in the interview that

4. The wide range of influencing factors is heightened by uncertainty due to the pandemic. Users are willing to have a renovated space with more amenities, further away from the office in a suburban area.

Proposed User Flow

In my new design, there will be a landing page, with tiles versus drop-down menus. Based on that landing page, this proposed design will have a “housing flow,” that will eventually lead the user looking to rent through this entire flow:

Because users have both housing wants and housing needs, I wanted to create a flow that allowed future tenants to determine how flexible they were towards budget, amenities, and their move-in date by allowing multiple tiles per question to be selected.

Craigslist’s Home Page (Desktop, Macbook Pro)

• Important CTA’s and sub-sections: For all users that both search and manage listings, I brought together the most used and important call to action buttons on the left-hand side of the landing page. During user testing, the “For Sale” section is most used as-is, so didn’t want to introduce anything new designs there.
• “Housing” Section: By clicking on “housing” or the image & sub-header copy below it, this leads to the eventual renter assessment experience, that will be shown when you keep reading and scrolling below!
• Navigate & Custom Search: Another priority is to make it more seamless for users to navigate, search, and access more applicable postings. A solution would be to create an assessment flow that outputs more custom, accurate listing results.
• *Bonus* Homepage Feature — “Best of” & “Missed Connections”: As mentioned, I wanted to bring these two items more to the forefront on the landing page. Craigslist’s “Best of” page includes a lot of the epic “missed connections” listings. For folks specifically looking to read the best-of “missed connections listings, you can now click the “Missed Connections,” CTA in the top navigation.

Beginning of the Flow: Start with Craigslist’s Landing Page

Selecting Housing Type, Budget, Laundry & Parking, and Move-In Date

Renter’s Housing Wanted Results

Steps for Next Iteration

After conducting usability testing, folks were excited to dive into their location a bit more. Because certain users have specific neighborhood pockets they were looking to move into, they wanted to select those specific pockets to help further generate custom results. Definitely looking forward to adding questions and selection options within this flow.

It means a lot that you took the time to read through this, and if YOU have any feedback, I’d love to share my prototype with you and hear your thoughts. You can reach me via LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jujushearer/. Thank you so much!