> Yadav had reportedly written a resignation letter on April 30 to the board and investors and questioning their "intellectual capability" and giving them a one-week deadline to "help in the transition". However, on May 5, he withdrew the resignation and apologised for his outbursts.
I call unstable. This CEO isn't maverick, world-changing bastard. He is simply unstable.
Moreover, there are huge questions about quality of hiring at Housing. Their website, app have had same bugs for 6 months, and they still remain. Over 2000 people can't make a decent bug-free website to see property listings?
The whole point of Housing was Airbnb style property listings - real verification, owners -only, professional photos and VR. And somehow their UX is one of their weakest points.
I actually think their UX is the best UI I have seen from an Indian website/app. When it first came out, the UI was way way ahead of anything from CommonFloor, MagicBricks, 99 Acres etc. That in turn put pressure on other real estate sites to improve the UX. You can see the transition by going through past archives of these sites.
Interestingly - thier UX when it first launched allowed you to specify a radius on a Map by drawing over it. They then reverted to a more common real estate UX of a search box. As a side note- Map based real estate listings look cool & then probably after A/B testing, they tend to revert to a list based view with a map based view to supplement it (42 Floors also went from Map based view to list based view).
About bugs & 2000 employees- my understanding is that most of these people are in the sales/operations side & note on the tech side. Just like a vast majority of Google's 53,000 employees are not engineers. Regardless, I am not sure of the co-relation between number of employees & bugs. In some cases, more engineering employees could introduce more bugs.
About customer satisfaction, its a hard problem, Rahul Yadav realizes it. Here is him on that topic in an interview.
End users are not satisfied when it comes to finding a house through the portal. People are asking why Housing is spending so much on ads when it can’t help people find real houses? “The industry is such! We’ll get there. Our current customer satisfaction rate is 25% and in theory, we can only reach to about 70%. We are pretty happy with the 25% rate considering when we started,” he says. Rahul stresses on the challenges of the industry and believes that becoming a marketing leader first is very important and then the growth can be along with the market.
Have put up my apartment for rent on Housing and all the other major realty sites.
In my experience, Housing has:
a) The best UI and UX
b) The best customer service in terms of tele-service, the agent coming over and taking photos, etc.
c) The best response - on the other sites, even when I clicked and uploaded my apartment photos, the response rate on Housing was the best.
d) Interesting add-on features such as 'lease agreement' maker and so on (which I only used to draft my own agreement with my tenant)
As regards 'aggressive campaigning', so many other companies are burning more expensive television moolah (e.g. Car Trade, Car Dekho, YepMe, Practo and more). And yet, this company interestingly attracts more than its fair share of criticism of aggressive campaigning - possibly thanks to some of media houses that also run property portals :)
Didn't go down that way for me. Their sign up form kept giving 503, and each time it did that, the form reset saving nothing I entered. That is a UX fail.
The form is not clear on expectations, when you don't follow them, it fails, resetting itself. That is a UX fail.
The service is only available in Metros, but they never say that during onboarding. Even their sign up form has all Indian cities. You put up your listing and if Housing is not in your city, you simply never get contacted. Fail without notice. That is a UX fail.
I managed to have 3 accounts with same e-mail. That is a massive, massive incompetent engineering. That is a UX fail.
UX and UI are not the same thing. Beauty is seen. Experience is felt. Housing's interaction design is absolute junk.
That's what I was thinking. Albeit incredibly altruistic, the CEO's job is to steer and control the direction of the company. Most of the time that it done due to his position, but sometimes that power is wielded due shares owned in the company.
This man does not sound like he should be the CEO.
Their UX is quite good. I was quite impressed when I saw their UX and even had an offer to join. But i was not impressed with interviwers and somehow felt arrogance whenever they talk. Now I understand why they grew that way.
I call unstable. This CEO isn't maverick, world-changing bastard. He is simply unstable.
Moreover, there are huge questions about quality of hiring at Housing. Their website, app have had same bugs for 6 months, and they still remain. Over 2000 people can't make a decent bug-free website to see property listings?
The whole point of Housing was Airbnb style property listings - real verification, owners -only, professional photos and VR. And somehow their UX is one of their weakest points.