Analyzing the Problem

Hick’s law states that the more options a person has, the longer it will take them to make a decision. In the context of Craigslist, the user is faced with way too many options (I counted 243 blue links!) right from the home page. The human brain has a limited capacity to process information, meaning Craigslist’s bombardment of links, though practical, is a complete violation of this law. This law is especially relevant to designing navigational structures (which is this entire homepage) as they will be key in whether a user feels confident they can complete their intended task. Although the current website design attempts to reduce the mental load by creating groups of information, visually there are just too many groups. Even when this grouping is viewed at the highest level, having four major sections is just too distracting for the user, especially when all the links and options in these sections are treated equally to each other. From the original website, we can also see how under-utilized the footer is. This can be a good place to “put away” information that isn’t commonly needed by users and therefore free up some of the “prime real-estate”.

First Redesign

My first edit was to reduce the number of sections to three, having only the main nav, the top bar for context and the main content. I kept the nav and context sections in the detail pages as well to keep the pages consistent. I moved all of the main category titles off to the navbar, completely eliminating the subcategories from the main page. Instead, I opt to display a “recent advertisements” board to give incoming users something to look at. The original website was very straightforward so I tried to keep the same tone in my redesign. 

In my redesign, the simplified navigation greatly reduces the amount of decisions the user has to make. It’s from these navigation headings that the user can access the full list of categories on the detail page. The main nav has fewer options and redundant buttons have been removed. In the context bar, the tags to pick specific locales have been turned into a dropdown to decrease the amount of info in the bar. The gallery view being the default view spaces out the information to reduce the mental load on the user while also displaying images to help them understand the listings faster.