Coroflot recently instituted an old-school email practice of emailing its members each month. Essentially, you have to click a link to verify that your “actively searching” status is still indeed active. When I first saw it, I thought it was mildly annoying. Once a month seemed a little excessive. And clicking a link is a little…manual.
However, I’ve started to come around and see its dead simple brilliance. From the recruiting POV, it makes total sense. Who wants to get hopped up about someone’s portfolio, only to receive a “no longer looking” or worse yet, no response at all?
Having experienced a similar frustration at a number of “post your property online” type sites like Airbnb, vrbo and Homeexchange, this simple act of those posting the product saying, “Yes” each month means that those users seeking the product will be less likely to think the mediating service is useless. It recognizes that the seeker’s time is valuable and that they may not want to waste their time on properties that aren’t even available. Homeexchange, unlike most seek/find, buy/sell sites, even requires a monthly membership fee so you would expect that at bare minimum, they would have some system of rewarding or filter out those users who actively respond to requests and update availability. Nope.
This was coincidentally confirmed in a recent usability test I conducted for a posting/finding commercial website for a completely different context and audience. A retailer remarked that she assumed that the commercial items being posted to the site would be actively maintained and the inventory kept up-to-date.
Yes, indeed. So why are there so many sites that don’t recognize this?