Have yet to use the mobile apps, but kudos to the Craigslist team for making their website one of the best mobile experiences out there. Loads quickly, easy to navigate, and isn't missing features compared to desktop. Certainly doesn't have the look we expect from a modern website but there's a level of usability we can all aspire to.
I find craigslist's fast loading pages to be problematic.
I think their website would be improved by rewriting it entirely in JavaScript, transpiling the JavaScript to JavaScript, requiring the JavaScript to render, re-implementing the entire UI in JavaScript including hyperlinks, then running JavaScript on the server to generate HTML, sending the HTML to the browser, also sending the JavaScript bundle with megabytes of hipster fonts and random people's github repos to insert spaces in a string and stuff, then finally re-rendering the client's page after the multi-megabyte JavaScript bundle finishes downloading.
Now that is the nice modern user experience I have come to demand as a user in 2019.
If a site feels unusable like this it's because you're the not the user. News sites, for example, are SPAs because they want to sell you ads. It has nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with the business using it.
Which news sites are SPA's? I haven't seen that. Most are usable without javsacript, though the experience is diminished and some have such harsh lazy-loading that the images are all invisible. And menus/search may be broken. I've never had a problem with navigation, though.
How are SPA-s and displaying ads related? The reload / page model benefits news sites more since they can generate more pageviews and hence ad reloads. There really is no connections. Devs implement SPA-s because they think it's better user experience (yes, it's hard to get it right).
You can still do ads (and they have been done for decades) without SPAs. In fact SPAs would reduce the efficiency of the ad tracking as the ad JS is now competing for resources with the SPA JS.
The point is if their goal was to just serve news or articles the site would be just thin layer over a CDN serving raw HTML. In order to serve and track dynamic advertisements they build sites with MBs of JavaScript instead.
- there aren't great ways for people to offer multiple items apart from making one listing with all the stuff (And having to update all the time)
- You have to do the whole "negotiate payment mechansim and shipping" thing every time. They could easily provide a sort of flow for when an agreement has happened
- On the buyer side you gotta basically just go in and delete your listing when it's done
There's an alternate universe in craigslist where you could somehow signal "I have a potential buyer" to put the thing in hold, and a single-button finalisation step when its done. Similarly, sellers could be able to register certain info to just plop it into a message.
I understand that the existing UX (mainly e-mail forwarding) makes this hard. But... well maybe they can change their UX
These are valid issues but I think they aren't a big deal. Every other platform I've seen that tries to be "smart" and offer these features ends up overdoing it and making it way too complicated & time consuming to post an ad for the first time.
CL in contrast is easy & understandable. You post an ad, post a price, and done. No "profile" or "account" to manage, etc.
In every dropdown menu you've ever used, the currently selected item pops up in the center of the control. The other items are arranged above and below the currently selected item.
Craigslist's view selector instead lays out the items below the control. "List" is always placed within the control, despite not being active. To select "List" you need to click what should be the currently selected item.
This is subjective, and also wrong. It's wrong because I use dropdowns all the time that always extend the entire list downward. I just double checked gmail and feedly for my own sanity. It's subjective because there is an advantage to static positioning: it allows the mind to develop a map of where each item is in non-relativistic terms, so selecting a given value is always the same two clicks.
Feedly and Gmail drop the entire menu down below the control. You're right, those kind of custom menus work fine. Note that the currently selected item is still always shown within the custom control.
Craigslist positions the first item of the static list within the control, forcing you to awkwardly select the control itself to select the first item. I have to think about it literally every time I use that drop down.
The Craigslist UX is FAR superior than almost any other mobile UX.
I use craigslist literally every day, and I praise its mobile design. If I could disagree with you on your assessment any more strongly, I would.
