Craigslist Evaluation

by Andrew Ferg, Ryan Soussan, John Subosits – aferg, rsoussan, subosits

aferg: https://www.dropbox.com/s/iao1pr387b4fagv/A3.pdf

rsoussan: https://www.dropbox.com/s/e1mk3oq5j647g5t/HCIIn_ClassAssignment.pdf

subosits: https://www.dropbox.com/s/tj3sb4ghyaiqhhg/Craigslist.docx

i) The most severe problem with the site in our opinion was the complete lack of regular structure to users posts. when seraching for a gig pr product, cost/pay is often not included, and the title of the post (which is all you see before clicking on the post for more info) has information in a random order (and occasionally tells you NOTHING useful about the product or event. Our suggested fixes included a more structured posting system, perhaps one with more guidelines, perhaps more categories in which to post, and certainly making price a required field for all posts, unless posting in the “free” category.

ii) Nielsen’s heuristics did not really seem to help a tin for this. A large deal of the hueristics were actually folowed, or were not very relevant to the context of the site, and the large overarching problems with craigslist were apparent from the beginning. However, it did help a bit to have the “Consistency and standards” and “error prevention” heuristics clearly stated.

iii) Since craigslist is a search-heavy site, it would be very useful to add more filtering criteria in order to improve the search function, and find other ways to improve the searching experiece (e.g. return related searches when there are no/few results, rather than just displaying a “nothing found” message.

iv)

1. Match prototyping example, including heuristic evaluation to a picture or example of them in use, or a situation in which they are being iplemented effectively.

2. Match each of the 10 heuristics to a picture or example of it being very well or very poorly used.