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.
I'm also fond of their branding somehow, and their aggressive campaigning, their staying away from TV, and them not forcing me to download their apps.
But that all falls short when the website fails 11 times just while I'm trying to put up a listing.
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 :)
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.
This man does not sound like he should be the CEO.
It's amazing just how much they iterate. I haven't come across a single bug to date. If anything, it's their inventory I am not satisfied with.
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.