First and foremost, thanks a bunch buddy for that near exhaustive review. Highly appreciate your inputs.

Classifying your comments in major categories and replying:

Instant-use related-

Since you’d appreciate that residential information is highly personal in nature, we let the first-user start building his adda only after we’ve talked to him and verified his information and intent. Hence the “we’d get in touch with you” message Sorry if you found it curt.

During this conversation, we also schedule a demo or/and provide the first user access to our test apartment, if he so wishes.

UI related –

we have the city dropbox, as we are highly optimistic

we don’t have the search box as we need to balance that optimism

FAQ and early adopter related -

Very valid inputs, we shall try to explore those areas further. Thank you.

Do keep visiting, and we look forward to your own Adda.

-Venkat

Some thoughts I noted down as I played with it:

- Users may not want to give out any real apartment details when registering for the first time.
- A sample apartment with dummy data where users can come and try
- Or a button to clone the sample apartment data if the user wants to tweak settings
- I didn’t understand *why* I can’t start using my account and just a curt “we shall contact you within 24 hours”
- And how about “Don’t show my apartment in the drop down” option? That could even be default
- Maybe a big search box where people can search for their apartment name? That kinda solves the lack of data create by privacy options. Also, picking a city seems superfluous as there are just 10 registered apts. at this stage.

UI
- All the different thumbnails on the home page point to only 2 different pages
- Password box too small

FAQ can be spruced up. That text feels like it’s talking only to people who are already using something for apartments. “Online options available today for neighborhood networking are next to none. “. My guess is there might enough first timers out there who can be lured by something like “Do you live in an apartment complex? Do you face so-and-so issues? Then ApartmentAdda helps you blah blah…” And “Do you already use Yahoo Groups? Then Apartment Adda offers blah blah….”

Hm, the person who registers an apartment is taking responsibility for more than just his user account. So unless this site comes in front of the early adopter/alpha-geek types in an apt., the average apartment dweller might find it beyond his ability. I hope you plan to strongly target such individuals or apartment associations by approaching them directly. How about a public PHPBB type forum right now, so that potential admins can post any questions to you openly? That way info won’t be lost in your mail inboxes.

Best of luck with future improvements. I hope to start using this in earnest some day

P.S: Any reason why this blog doesn’t allow anonymous or name based comments?