CRAIGSLIST
Can Craigslist adapt to a mobile experience?
INTRO
Craigslist was founded by Craig Newmark in 1995 on the principles of community and simplicity. Since then Craigslist has blossomed into a multi billion dollar company with a global audience. However, do those values still uphold today?
While Craigslist is still a very popular platform today, the lack of improvement and updating has lead the platform to fall quite short of the constantly evolving modern technology. As time has passed, technology and user experiences involving personal communication, transactions, and security have changed drastically. Over the years Craigslist has formed a stigma for itself that is dated, hard to use, and most importantly, unsafe. Our teams goal was to bring the feeling of community and trust back to the forefront of the platform, update the products features to match modern user to user platforms, and make the product easier and more convenient for to use.
IDENTIFYING PAIN POINTS
The first step in our process was to conduct a survey amongst a wide variety of craigslist users to identify specifically what the main issues with the platform are and to identify our demographic and target audience.
MAIN PAINPOINTS:
1. Safety
2. UI and Hierarchy
3. Messaging/Contacting users
4. Lack of features
UNDERSTANDING THE USER AND HOW THEY ENGAGE
SOLUTIONS
SAFETY & SECURITY
We took a culmination of features and integrated them into the new product that combined, add safety and security to the platform. Our first solution was establishing user profiles that could then be verified with another form of social media (i.e Facebook). The user profiles help confirm that people are who they say they are and give other users a sense of who they're talking to and a more personal interactions. Another feature within our user profiles is a rating system, allowing users to rate or report sellers ands posters based on their conduct which creates consequences for scams while allowing users to avoid other users with low ratings for their own safety. Another new feature we developed was how to confirm the payment process. By creating a phone to phone QR scan, users now have to confirm they are with the seller and have seen the true product and agree upon it before paying via a secure payment processing product (i.e Venmo, Paypal, etc.) Through our research we found many users wouldn't trust a Craigslist brand payment system as of now, and would rather use a payment system they already use, but could see a Craigslist payment program being an option in the future.
VISUAL SIMPLICITY
