The massively popular classified listing site still looks and functions like a mid-1990s web page.
The right side of the screen is devoted to an exhaustive list of cities and countries, although most users care about only the one they live in. Once you dive into a section, navigation requires more backtracking than a hedgerow maze. Locations aren’t sorted in sufficient detail, images aren’t available until you click through to a listing, and items can’t be flagged for side-by-side comparison. And that’s just the desktop version. On a mobile browser, craigslist is an interminable roll of links rendered in eye-crossingly minuscule text.
WIRED magazine asks (among others) Khoi Vinh – the designer of the New York Times website, and SimpleScott – the former design director of BarackObama.com, how they would redesign Craigslist to make it looks more up to date.