Today I want to quickly comment on the “dine funn” (your stored items) function on finn.no. Firstly, I must say it has improved substantially with this new UI and, especially, with some new interaction. In particular, the interaction for deleting and for commenting, which is now Ajax-based, avoids lengthy page reloads, and works much better. However, I do have some small complaints.

The first “complaint” is in fact about the comments feature. I understand that finn.no is trying to make comments a social activity (even though I haven’t tried that yet), as my comments appear as “you: _comment text_. Because of that however, when there’s more than one comment, they appear as a thread for each one of the stored items. Now, I cannot edit my comments, and that is a bit unfortunate, as comments may change based on, for example, having read the full documentation of a house, or having been to a showing, or having tested a second-hand piano etc.

If I change my mind a few times, soon enough I have a long thread with comments. Some times I may want to keep them all, to see the “history”, while other times I may want to delete old comments (or, better, edit the one comment). More than anything, however, I want to be in control of this choice.

Another thing to mention is the “status” of each item in my stored list. This status is signaled by either a green dot (on sale), or by a red cross. Now, the red cross may indicate one of at least three things: the item has been sold; the ad has been set to “passive” (but I can still access the item through the link); the item has been deleted.

I would very much like to have this clarified in my stored items page, as it certainly makes some difference whether an item has been sold or whether it has been set passive, especially if I am following closely to see whether I may get away with a bid lower than the advertised price.

In addition to that, often enough an item which displays a green dot (mostly experienced with houses) turns out sold when I visit the full profile page!

One important thing is specific to houses: showing times. I would very much like to have the showing dates/times displayed in the list, so as to avoid to check every single house for that information. In fact, I would like to be able to filter the list by week-end (usually showings happen in the week-end) or by a date range of my choosing. And why not placing a nice calendar somewhere in my list page, so I’ll be able to pick and choose days, weeks, months as filter criteria?

To conclude, a notation: for each item there is a link “flytt” (move), which allows one to move an item from one list to another (as one may create several lists). However, as I have one list only, I’d rather not see that (useless in my case) link, and reduce the clutter -

Well, hopefully finn.no will embrace my wishes!

Tags: finn.no, Informal (everyday) tests