Craigslist’s App Heuristic Evaluation & Redesign

A heuristic evaluation and redesign proposal concentrated on usability improvements of the Craigslist app that helps users sell or buy products and services online.

• Role: UX Designer

• Tools: Figma

• Time: 2 weeks (2020)

• Partner: Diana Zbraniecki

To identify and evaluate common usability heuristics of the Craigslist mobile app.

To find opportunities to make a more user-friendly design to help people buy and sell their items in the most efficient way while remaining on-brand with the iconic design. 

Evaluate the app’s selected task flow using Nielsen Norman Group’s Usability Heuristics. Rate every interaction between 0 and 4 severity scale. Provide recommendations to improve the usability of the app. And finally, showcase design improvements of the app.

Craigslist has been the leading digital marketplace around the world since 2003. Since going worldwide the design of the online platform has barely changed through the years.

Once we started our research, we found out that app has poor reviews relating to the overall usability of the application. Due to the size of the app, we decided to lead a heuristic evaluation of only one task flow ("New Posting") to identify problems that the user may face while posting an ad on the IOS app.

The “New Posting“ task flow was chosen for the heuristics evaluation because it was the most commonly used task flow among users. The task flow starts with creating a new post, choosing type and category, filling the posting details, adding a photo, checking preview and finally posting the ad.

We used Nielsen Norman Group’s Usability Heuristics to identify and evaluate the “New Posting“ task flow. After the evaluation, we gave each heuristic a severity rating from 0 - 4.

Based on the Nielsen Norman Group’s Usability Heuristics we were able to identify 6/10 usability heuristics that challenged users to post an ad on the craigslist app. There were no catastrophic issues, 2 major usability issues, 3 minor and 1 cosmetic.

We have suggested the flowing next steps to improve the user experience while using the app.