As of this morning, registration is no longer required to leave a review on sho’fr.

Plenty of very valid points could be made either for or against this change. For us it boiled down to one simple question: “does registering scare people away?”  Because we have no 12 month trend reports or focus groups to tell us what to do, we went with our gut. And in reality, this gut response could certainly be applied to any business:

Remove (or minimize) the barriers your customers or clients have to deal with.

For us, this means eliminating a registration process that required 2 additional PHP pages, a user password, a security question, and precious minutes as our users wait for a welcome email to hit their inbox. For the corporate world, revise your 17 page, 141 step, Vendor Ordering Manual. For social network sites, drop the cryptic captcha.

Yes, we now have the task of dealing with spam, abuse, and possible foul language in reviews, but shouldn’t that burden be our responsibility in the first place, and not our customers?