CASE STUDY ON CRAIGSLIST

ABOUT

Craigslist is an American classified advertisements website with sections devoted to jobs, housing, for sale, items wanted, services, community service, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums

Being one of the most recognized websites, and their minimal and WEB 1.0 - type design, made it a unique choice for our project.

FEATURES

PURPOSE

Academic

GOAL

Analyze craigslist's UI

TIME

2 months

ROLE

User researcher

TOOLS

Google Docs | Miro

MY TAKEAWAY

qualitative & quantitative research methodology

FORMULATING HUMAN NEEDS AND CENTRAL TASKS

FORMING EVALUATION GOALS

CONDUCTING OBSERVATIONAL STUDIES AND SURVEYS

ANALYZING RESULTS OF STUDIES

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

HUMAN NEEDS AND CENTRAL TASKS

During this phase of the study we held group meetings to discuss what the human needs might be if one was to use this website.

We then highlighted the probable central tasks around those needs and focused our evaluation studies around them.

We used miro as the platform to discuss and brainstorm these ideas.

EVALUATION GOALS

We set the following evaluation goals for our study:

Are the parameters offered in Craigslist useful and flexible enough for users to search their suitable places?
Is the listing organized well enough to help the user to read through the information before contacting the landlord?
How well does Craigslist display the filtering tools to the users (so that they can easily recognize what criteria can be actually used for searching a house)

It was important for our evaluation goals to tackle 3 major areas of UX principles: Usability, findability, and discoverability.

SURVEY DEVELOPMENT

There were thorough group discussions on the type of questions we would we need to put into the survey to get the best combination of qualitative and quantitative data for our study.

With our evaluation goals in mind and after careful literature reviews of research-study designs, I played a crucial part in designing non-leading Likert-Scale type questions.

OBSERVATIONAL STUDIES

For the observational study, we decided to choose the Think aloud protocol. I played a primary part in formulating the observational study protocol, and also conducted the study on participants.

The Protocol:

Before starting the study, we asked the participant for consent to be recorded for the study.
With the evaluation goals in mind, we formulated specific tasks for the participants and briefed the task to them.
We asked them to speak out their mind while completing the task, while simultaneously noting down the critical incidents in a coding sheet.
To make sure we did not miss any critical incidents we went over the recording at least once to check for them.

ANALYSIS OF RESULTS

After looking at the results of the survey and the observational study, we decided to break down the analysis in two parts - 1) The quantitative data, and 2) qualitative data. This was for our own ease of analysis.

1) We looked at the data of the Likert scale questions on the survey and took the mean, median, mode and Standard deviation of the answers to get a better understanding of the data. Qualtrics helped visualizing the data.

2) We found most of our qualitative data using some open ended questions on the survey and the observational study.

Linking the two, we deduced the results of the study and presented it in our Case-study report.