In the world of the internet, some sites—Twitter, Gmail, Gawker—update every few years, while others—Craigslist, eBay—seem perfectly content to never change their look, or to modify them only slightly. In an academic exercise from 2009, Wired asked designers to update the very old user interface for Craigslist. SimpleScott, the former design head for BarackObama.com, wondered, “Craigslist is working, [so why change it?]” It’s a good question. Both Craiglist and Gmail are wildly successful at what they do, and they’ve both been good at what they do since they first started, so why is Gmail forever changing while Craigslist stays the same?
“I think this comes down to an identity question,” says Agnieszka Gasparska, founder of Kiss Me I’m Polish, a New York City-based strategy and design firm. “We think of Google as an innovation company. They’re all about technology and they’re constantly coming up with new products and paradigms that are groundbreaking when first released. Hence, reinvention is deeply rooted in their personality, so they can’t really stay the same.”
