This, right after talking about Craigslist, a site that enjoys a monthly cycle of "Craigslist sucks, it's so ugly!" ranters who are reliably and continually proven to be clueless.
As mtgentry replied, Craigslist had a huge advantage in being first to market. But now as Craigslist is being supplanted by more niche focused sites, you better believe that good design will be an integral part of those new sites. Refer to http://thegongshow.tumblr.com/post/345941486/the-spawn-of-cr...
Not to mention, with apps like Padmapper, Craigslist is quickly becoming a data source with a really lame API (i.e., scraping), rather than a frontend in and of itself.
The existence and popularity of various "Craigslist overlay" sites is plenty of evidence that design and usability is important to users.
Yeah. I knew someone would call me out for saying the thing about ugly sites right after mentioning Craigslist but I think my point still stands. The only reason I felt I could safely say that was because of your point exactly, imjk. Thanks for saying it better than I could.
No, your point doesn't stand when it's predicated on imjk's skills at predicting the future and a rhetorical interpretation of Craigslist's life so far.
Both history and reality confirm for us that ugly sites other than CL do just fine.
Craigslist won because it was first to market. If anything, their particular case might prove that having deep network effects are more important than good design.
It drives me crazy that Craig won't allow image previews for apartment listings. It's a poor design decision. But since they own that space of mind, it's extremely difficult for someone else to come along and dethrone them with a better product.
Right, same here. But the average person doesn't know how to make a distinction between "this is easy to use and very consistent" and "this is boring and ugly". To most, if it's dull and plain they say it's ugly. I regret mentioning Craigslist noe because we're missing the point. I see now that Criagslist is a special case. It's famous, infamous, and just massively popular. It came out at a time when Yahoo was just as ugly but was still heavily trafficked and people were used to similar designs. If Craigslist were a new player in town then it may not be able to expand beyond San Feansisco. People would visit and immediately be turned off because they're used to all the trappings of Yelp, Thumbtack.com and others. Being cute enough to get attention at first glance goes much farther than I think we realize and if Craigslist were the new guy it wouldn't grab attention at first glance looking how it does.
Beating a dead horse here, but Craigslist was able to acquire a critical mass of users by being first to market. If you actually examine the overall user experience from a functional UX perspective, Craigslist isn't actually that bad.