How Craigslist’s competition is winning the UX battle with in-app chat

Craigslist might outlast us all, but its stubbornness may someday catch up.

This article was originally published on November 30, 2020, at Stream.

When buying or selling used items online, where is the first place people turn?

Ask six people, and you may get six different answers. But a common option, or at least consideration, remains Craigslist. Perhaps because of its first-to-the-party status (est. 1995) and subsequent success, the company’s brand remains sturdy decades later, maintaining an undeniable association people have with, say, buying used bikes and kitchenware (or, uh, other things) on the internet. And by most accounts, the company continues to hum along — a brief glance of the site shows countless new items for sale each day, and in 2019 the company was reportedly earning upwards of $1 billion in annual revenue.

But as “Craigslist” remains effectively embedded into the everyday lexicon of e-commerce, the service’s user experience is not what you might expect for a leading tech company. Not least of which is its interface — Craigslist’s digital properties (it only got around to releasing an app last year) appear more like online message boards from the early 2000s. Barebones displays along with a healthy amount of spam listings seem to indicate that the site is broken or has gone unmanaged for years.

Craigslist’s beauty is born from an apparent ethos that could define a thrift shop: Hey, take a look around, we might have what you’re looking for, good luck.

And you know what? It can be a breath of fresh air from the daily cacophony of nearly every other part of the internet. Free of jittery ads and intrusive notifications, it is endearing at times to access a site that lower cases every bit of text, one that hasn’t much updated its color schema in years, and one that is apparently unconcerned if you stay, leave, or forget about it entirely. To be sure, there is a beauty in its antiquated aesthetic, a beauty born from an apparent ethos that could define a thrift shop:

Hey, take a look around, we might have what you’re looking for, good luck.