To many people living in city areas across the United States, Craigslist is a lifesaver when to comes to help finding apartments, roommates, deals on used furniture, gadgets, event tickets, and more. It’s even been proven to help people track down thieves and lost items, or provide wacky but entertaining posts like this woman who wanted to sell her Modern Warfare 3-addicted husband. Whatever you use Craigslist for, the one consensus is this: The site is much too ugly, text-heavy, and terrible on the eyes.
Perhaps some users enjoy the web 1.0 simplicity, but it appears Craigslist may finally be looking into joining the modern day of web design judging by this job ad. According to this listing, Craigslist is looking for “Senior UI / Usability / Front End Engineers” to “improve the craigslist user experience.” The posting, which was naturally found on Craigslist itself since the site does not have a Careers section, did not say specifically if the engineers needed to help give the very basic site a makeover though that is a large part of the User Interface. All that was made clear was the engineers will help the make the site “faster, friendlier and easier” and internally more efficient and effective. They will also help move Craigslist toward a mobile compatibility with an app development, though given the site’s plain interface, it’s quite mobile-friendly already.
With Craigslist still receiving 30 billion page views and 50 million new classified ads monthly, it’s no wonder it’ll need help managing the unstoppable traffic. Now only if they can do a better job preventing and removing spammer posts from every section. For example, it would be nicer if users can add more than just four photos to a post with a verified stamp, much like Airbnb does with their rental posts to make each listing more authentic. A map estimating the poster’s location could also help users estimate the distance they need to travel to meet the Craigslister in real life. But then again, with Craigslist offering a completely free-of-charge service, we might be asking for too much. What else do you think the site could improve in terms of usability?
Click here to see the full job posting while it’s still live. Hopefully this means we will see something new come out of the site in the following few months.
