Hookitiupnow.com is a destination for people that want to "enjoy" their craigslist experience. The thought was to take an already "sticky" application or site that people use daily and improve on the experience in such a way that makes everything easier to use and in a sense, become even stickier.

I like to use craigslist, and one area that i found that was particularly troubling was that there is no real good way to browse postings and keep track of all the emails you send out to people. This is most noticeable in the personals sections. The user has to click on an post, view it to see if their is a pic inside, then reply to ad address like: pers-197976520@craigslist.org . So if you send out a few emails and someone responds, you will see that not only do you not remember who you emailed, but you have a hard time looking up the post again. This needed to be fixed.

There are a host of other problems that make the experience less user-friendly,like, no gallery view to look at pictures at a glance, a very silo ed experience that makes the user jump in and out of posts and no real understanding of location if traveling. Of course these are not huge problems, and most the CL community likes the fact that its geeky and strait forward and plain. As a designer i totally understand what they are doing, but as designer with a background in friendly application.

Here is are initial answer to cleaningup the experience in four basic points.

1. Get google maps involved

2. Give the user the ability to browse by picture.

3. Give the user the ability to read posts on the same page.

4. Give the user the ability to "save" or snip posts so they can remember who they emailed.

Now, that's not that hard is it?
Essentially our user will be able to browse craigslist posts and read them without ever leaving the page! Secondly, the user will be able to browse posts that have pictures attached to them, this makes for a more pleasurable visual experience. Who doesn't like to look at picture! and usually when people are at craigslist, they search for posts with pics to see if their is something neat inside. Third, when our user clicks on a post and reads it, we will map the area and location on google maps so the user gets a sense of where the person is located. This is quite helpful if traveling and someone doesn't know how far away a person is from them.

There are allot of other benefits and ideas that we have in this mashup that will make it easier to do things. My main objective is to clean up the web a bit in some ways and make experiences easier for our everyday user. The internet is like the wild west right now and some parts of it are so badly designed that new users get frustrated. If by mashing up ideas that are out there today make for a better experience, than why not play a little.

is and large user base sites ( aol ), I needed to see what i could change here.